A new ceiling fan in Munday

to the point


So much for spring, let’s just spring forward to a full-blown summer. Our days are beautiful now, right? They sure get warm in the afternoon. I discovered, although, if you work in the shade it’s not so hot.

I guess by now everyone has noticed the windmill at the Cude residence on the west side. When I first heard about it I had this picture in my mind of huge fan blades that almost touch the ground. It’s nothing like that at all: it’s a residence windmill for generating electricity for the home. If it produces too much to be used instantly it hops on the grid and goes to the governor’s mansion. The governor wants to save money, too.

Until the mid-19th century, habitable land had to have a nearby water source, quite a restriction on early Texas settlers hoping to make a go of it. What we see happening now is sort-of a replay of history. You’ve heard “what goes around comes around,” the windmill has come around again.

Using wind power as a natural propulsion force has been around for centuries, the earliest known use of wind power, of course, is the sail boat. And this technology had an important impact of the later development of wind power.

It was in 1854 that Daniel Halladay of Connecticut developed the American water-pumping windmill. Halladay’s version was a great improvement on the clunky European model. This new design allowed farmers and ranchers totap in to groundwater and pump it to the surface.

By the 1870’s, the Halladay windmill could be found on many farms and ranchs in Texas, where watering livestock this way had become the norm. Texas soon became the country’s largest user of windmills.

Between 1850 and 1970, over six million wind machines were installed in the U.S. Larger windmills were used to pump water for the steam railroad trains that provided the primary source of commercial transportation in areas where there were no navigable rivers.

By the mid-1920’s, 1 to 3-kilowat wind generators found widespread use in the rural areas of the Great Plains. These systems provided lighting for farms and power to charge batteries used in crystal radio sets. The demand of farmsteads for larger amounts of power on demand, and the Great Depression, which spurred the U.S. federal government to stimulated the depressed rural economies by extending the electrical grid throughout those areas, brought about the end of the small systems.

The interference by the government was not a popular development, but as we say, “time moved on and the folks had to move with it.”

With electricity “on demand” at everyone’s disposal, interest in wind power slowed down, at least in the United States.

U.S. interest and efforts were rekindled after the 1973 oil embargo, with the entry of the U.S. Federal Wind Energy Program into the cycle of wind energy development. And this made a federal case of wind energy.

Like “they” say, the rest is history.

Today Texas leads the nation in wind power capacity for both water-pumping and electricity, and several museums and wind farms celebrate this piece of our past. In Lubbock, for example, the American Wind Power Center houses one of the world’s largest collections of water-pumping windmills. One can see more than 150 restored examples, many dating to the 1800s.

Everything about the history of and the present-day happenings of the newer, larger, wind turbines is interesting. How the experts decide where to place these huge ceiling fans is worth a look on the web to learn something about it.

Thank you Shawn and Keila Cude for stimulating this history lesson and maybe a peek into our future.