The year was 1970. I had built a small water wheel and used it to run a generator from an old car to provide power for my remote mountain cabin. The next summer the creek dried up, leaving my water wheel annoyingly still. A friendly neighbor, an old hermit named Sidney McGehee looked at the stationary wheel and said, "Theres energy in the Air." It was the first of several things Sidney told me that changed my life forever. My first electric generating windmill looked like a small farm windmill and performed rather poorly. I rebuilt it using wooden blades that were hand carved on my kitchen table. The new blades worked much better, but were still not satisfactory. After quite a bit of additional gluing, carving, ballancing and modifications to the generator, I finally got it working well. Keeping it from destroying itself in strong winds became the next problem. There was only one small radio battery charging wind generator available then, a design unchanged from 1920. that was on the market in the US then. There were no books or plans available before I began selling plans and blades in "Popular Science" magazine. The money from those plans and blades began flowing in and I was in the windmill business. This was several technical generations before the early "Model A" prototype seen in this photo - my first attempt at a production windmill. Many improvements were to come.