In response to Peter Fairley’s excellent historical review of UMass’ Wind Furnace project in IEEE Spectrum, (See This 1976 University Experiment Spun Up the U.S. Wind Industry: A nuclear submarine veteran turned a truck axle into a turbine) I’ve posted my historical photos of the machine to Wikimedia Commons.
The archive photos used in Fairley’s article are far superior to my two taken sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s when I was living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. All I remember about the day was that it was cold, overcast, if not dreary, and the turbine was not spinning. The color film I was using then was the cheapest I could find and that’s the reason for the yellow tint in the close up.
Wind Furnace (WF-1), the experimental wind turbine, was installed in November 1976 at the University of Massachusetts’ Amherst campus for directly heating the modular building nearby. The wind turbine was designed, built and installed by graduate students. The 25 kW wind turbine used three fiberglass blades downwind of the tower on a variable pitch, variable speed rotor 32.5 feet (~10 meters) in diameter. The blade design and downwind orientation led directly to the initial design of US Windpower’s twenty prototype 30 kW wind turbines that were used on the Crotched Mountain wind farm–the first in the USA—in 1980. Many of those who worked on the wind turbine went on to careers in the then nascent wind industry. Woody (Forest) Stoddard designed the blades. WF-1 could have been the original source for the US wind industry’s predilection for downwind, free-yaw designs that dominated the American industry until the arrival of the Danes in the early to mid-1980s.
The turbine was removed in 2004.
