The Inhabitable Wind Turbine

[Image: From Power from the Wind by Palmer Cosslett Putnam].

"In May 1931," author Palmer Cosslett Putnam wrote in his 1949 book Power from the Wind, and "after two years of wind measurement, a wind-turbine 100 feet in diameter was put in operation on a bluff near Yalta, overlooking the Black Sea, driving a 100-kilowatt, 220-volt induction generator, tied in by a 6300-volt line to the 20,000-kilowatt, peat-burning steam-station at Sevastopol, 20 miles distant."
As if anticipating BLDGBLOG's recent look at infrastructural domesticity, Putnam points out that "a streamlined house" containing generators was held aloft behind the turbine – but this "house" also offered a temporary place of rest to the maintenance workers who checked up on the turbine's workings. Accessible via a long flight of stairs, this airborne space added a small touch of domestic comfort to an otherwise industrial piece of machinery in the sky.

[Sent in by Alexis Madrigal, who also had this image scanned from Putnam's book].