2Q BULLETIN 173, U. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM 



in the will of Governor Benedict Arnold (1677) and is said to have 

 been preceded by a wooden one, of still earlier date, blown down in 

 1675. Another of popular interest is the windmill erected at Orient, 

 L. I., in 1760 by Amos Tabor for Noah Tuthill (restored 1810), which 

 was removed to an amusement park on Glen Island about 1900. 

 Others that were standing within the past few years were erected at 

 Detroit, Mich., Lawrence, Kans., and East Hampton, L. I., N. Y. 



The type of windmill that has come into general use in the United 

 States, however, has little resemblance to the European tower mill. 

 In place of the few large sails of the Dutch mill, the American mill 

 has a small compact wind wheel made up of many small slats or 

 blades, and instead of the stone or shingled building that supported 

 the machinery of the mill and sometimes housed the miller and his 

 family, the American type of mill is supported on a skeleton tower 

 of wood or steel framework, and the machinery driven by it, if 

 housed at all, is usually protected by a small shed at the base of the 

 tower. The wind wheel is mounted upon a pivot at the top of the 

 tower and is faced into the wind by a simple rudderlike vane or 

 sometimes merely by the pressure of the wind upon the back of the 

 wheel itself. Governing devices maintain uniform speeds of the 

 wheels and prevent injury from runaways by automatically turning 

 the wheels away from the wind or in others by changing the pitch 

 of the blades in the wheels. 



The earliest mills of this type had wheels with rigid wooden vanes 

 and were without governing or safety devices. L. H. Wheeler, an 

 Indian missionary, in Wisconsin, used solid wheel windmills to pump 

 water and grind corn as early as 1841, and some time thereafter he 

 perfected a means of automatically controlling their speed. His 

 patent of 1867 (no. 68674) was the first of the solid wheel mills 

 mounted upon a pivot and equipped with hinged tail vane and 

 "weights that operated to change the position of the wheel in relation 

 to the direction of the wind so that a constant speed was held in 

 spite of varying winds or load, and the mill was automatically turned 

 edgewise to the wind in dangerous squalls and gales. This type of 

 governing and safety device has been used with modifications in the 

 greatest number of windmills built in the United States (Eclipse, 

 Monitor, and others) and is employed in connection with the steel- 

 vane mills made today. 



In 1854 Daniel Halladay and John P. Burnham perfected the first 

 form of a wind wheel in which control of the speed was obtained by 

 varying the pitch of the vanes in the wheel (Halladay's patent, no. 

 11629). Burnham (who is sometimes called "the father of the Amer- 

 ican type of windmill") and Halladay manufactured and improved 

 the windmill thereafter for many years. In 1883 at the laboratory 

 of the Halladay Co., then located at Batavia, 111., Thomas O. Perry 



