Welcome back to my newsletter. In the latest installment of my podcast I talk to wind power expert Brandon N. Owens about the fascinating story of the Jacobs Brothers—pioneers who brought electricity to rural America in the early 20th century using innovative wind turbines.
Learn how these mechanically minded brothers built their own turbines using car parts, scaled their business to supply thousands of farms, and even inspired generations of modern wind energy engineers. Discover why the three-blade design they championed is still the industry standard today—and how their vision clashed with centralized utility power as America’s grid expanded.
You can also listen to the full episode on the links below:
🎧 Spotify:
🎧 Apple Podcasts:
Below is a transcript of the conversation:
Henry Sanderson:
Well, Brandon, thanks so much for joining me.
Brandon N. Owens:
You're welcome. It's a pleasure to be here.
Henry Sanderson:
Well, today we'd like to talk about the Jacobs Brothers, which is a fascinating story of one of the most successful early wind turbines from 1930s to 1950s. I wondered if you could just begin by telling us the early life of the Jacobs brothers and where they grew up.
Brandon N. Owens:
Absolutely. So yeah, it's a really fascinating story and you know their journey on wind power sort of began out of necessity and it began before the 1930s. The family relocated a ranch near Vita, in 1910 and like many rural families at the time, they had no access to centralized electricity. So their first solution was a gas power generator. But the fuel at that time was expensive and hard to obtain. And so they were looking for alternatives and that led them to experiment with wind power. And so by the twenties, they had outgrown the power capacity of their diesel generator and they started developing wind turbines on their ranch. And, what they did basically is take the American windmill, which is the common windmill you see on farms, and used a rear axle of a Ford Model T and it fixed it to DC generator and locked the differential with a pin and created the first wind turbine. And that's how they got into the wind business. And then they continued to experiment
Henry Sanderson:
Mm-hmm.
Brandon N. Owens:
They figured out that it had too many blades, which is sort of a common thing. The multi-bladed American windmill has lots of blades and that's very good for torque, but it's not real good for velocity. So they kept experimenting and by 1926 they had figured out that you wanted aircraft-style propellers on the wind turbine.
And they settled on a two-bladed airfoil design. And by 1927, they came up with the three-bladed design, which is the most common today. It's the industry standard. And they started.
Henry Sanderson:
And he'd been taking flying lessons, right? That's how he came up with the idea.
Brandon N. Owens:
Yes, that's right. They were also into flying. And so, you know, they were just experimenting on their ranch to meet their own electricity needs. And they were very—Joe and Marcellus, the brothers—very mechanically minded. And that's how they came up with their wind turbines. So it's a really interesting story.
Henry Sanderson:
And how did they get into business? Was it a case the neighbors wanted one, other farmers, other ranchers wanted one, and then they decided to go into manufacturing?
Brandon N. Owens:
Yeah, there was local demand, if you will, and they built a very good wind turbine. And by 1931, they actually had sold the ranch and moved to Minneapolis, I believe it was. And when they were in Minneapolis, they opened a wind turbine manufacturing facility. And that's where they really ramped up production.
They continued to innovate. I think they were awarded something like 25 patents. They redesigned their generator. Again, they added innovations and that's when the Jacobs Wind Electric Company was born. And that's when they really started manufacturing in their own right and became a pretty dominant force in the early wind power industry.
Henry Sanderson:
Do you know how many they sold? Because I think later in life Marcella said he sold about $50 million worth of these turbines.
Brandon N. Owens:
Yeah, that's right. $50 million over 25 years. I don't have the exact number. They employed 260 workers and they were at one point producing 8 to 10 wind turbines per day. And there was a massive demand in rural America at the time because they hadn't extended the transmission lines to most of the western US and they were supplying most of farm country with Jacobs wind turbines.
Henry Sanderson:
And then they were known as the Cadillac of wind turbines. I mean, they were incredibly reliable, right? And incredibly good quality.
Brandon N. Owens:
Yeah, I mean, in some sense, they were overbuilt. They were expensive in their day. You could get less expensive, less reliable machines that were in the market, but they had a lot of pride in what they did and they innovated. And so they were very successful. And there's even a story about one of their wind turbines being installed at the Byrd Antarctic Expedition Base in 1933. And that turbine, legend has it, actually operated for over two decades in some of the harshest conditions on Earth. And that really kind of proved the durability of their wind turbines.
Henry Sanderson:
Yeah, I think his son went back right to the site and saw that it was still going.
Brandon N. Owens:
Still running. That's an amazing story.
Henry Sanderson:
And the other interesting thing you do in your book is you calculate potentially the cost of electricity from these turbines, which you say was, I think it's around 21 cents a kilowatt hour, which you say was cost-competitive to electricity from utilities at the turn of the 20th century. But by the 1930s, that cost had come down quite considerably, right? So they couldn't really compete.
Brandon N. Owens:
Yeah, I mean, that's the story of wind power throughout the 20th century. Just always chasing this moving target. 20 cents a kilowatt hour. That's not bad actually, even today. But when you're able to get power from the grid at 10 cents a kilowatt hour, that just doesn't work. And so it was always sort of chasing the moving target and what happened with remote wind power installations. I think in the 1930s, of course, you had the Rural Electrification Act as part of the New Deal. And that led to the expansion of the transmission system in rural America. And that really was kind of the beginning of the end of remote grid and small wind turbines.
In the US now it took a couple of decades to play out, but as they expanded the grid, one of the preconditions to hook up some of those remote locations, some of those farms, was they actually had to take on some of the existing wind turbines that they had. So they had to remove the existing generators before the utility would come out and actually install the transmission network. So that was the death knell, the slow death knell for these remote systems and for wind power in rural America.
Henry Sanderson:
Was there no pushback given that they had a successful business and there were other companies, right? Was there no lobbying or pushback against that build out?
Brandon N. Owens:
There was pushback, but there just wasn't much you could do. I mean, that had been passed. It was part of the New Deal. I mean, you've got sort of powerful utility and government interests who passed this legislation. And look, I mean rural electrification was seen as a good thing. I mean, people wanted the electricity. They wanted to be able to use the appliances, the radios, and so it was sort of a slow motion death for these small DC systems.
Henry Sanderson:
So the farmers were happy to give them up then.
Brandon N. Owens:
They were, yeah, ultimately, yes.
Henry Sanderson:
And then later in life, when there was in the 1970s, I guess, the wind power revival, it seems from reading that Marcellus Jacobs wasn't actually that supportive of the industry and he's kind of a bit of an old curmudgeon. You know, why do you think that was?
Brandon N. Owens:
Well, actually, let me, there's something interesting that happened.
In the 1950s, which was a slow period for wind power, at least in the United States. There was some research and development happening in Europe at the time. And there was an effort to conduct R&D in the United States. And there was a bill that was passing through the US Congress.
And there was an effort to garner support for that legislation, which would have led to the development of wind research and wind turbines as a complement to hydropower, which is actually a pretty good match. And Joe Jacobs actually wrote a letter to that congressional committee against that research indicating that large wind projects would be a failure and indicating he had an insistence that only small wind turbines were the only viable solution. And that really left a bad impression on what was the wind industry at that time and helped lead to what was really a stagnation and wind energy development for the next couple of decades. And so I think the Jacobs brothers, Marcellus and Joe, I think from the beginning believed that small wind turbines—these were DC not grid-connected systems—that was the appropriate role for wind power. And so then you fast forward to the 1970s.
And what’s happening in the 1970s, of course, is you have the oil crisis, 1973 oil crisis. And then the reaction to that was, well, in the US and in Europe, we need to ramp up all of these research projects. And in the US that was done through NASA and later DOE, a lot of funding for large-scale wind turbines. And these are wind turbines of megawatt scale.
Brandon N. Owens (continued):
We're in 10 megawatts now, that would be grid-connected. So these aren't DC remote systems, they're AC grid-connected systems. And so the idea was we were going to conduct research and build utility-scale wind turbines. And that's what the whole thrust of the activity was in the 70s.
And that was the beginning of the American Wind Energy Association and those lobbying groups and all of that government R&D. So now that's the long answer to your question. And so those groups at the time were reaching out to Joe and Marcellus because he was a legend in the industry and the most successful wind manufacturer in the US to kind of pull them into their efforts.
I think they wanted him to accept and sort of bless what they were doing. He sort of had the same attitude that he had had the whole time, which was that these are small DC systems and we've sort of already figured it out and there's no reason to try to build these large multi-megawatt systems that you want to interconnect into the utility system. And so there was this tension there between the other wind manufacturers and sort of this newer school of innovators in the wind industry.
Henry Sanderson:
But was he right in some senses? Because what I read is that the government R&D programs failed and the sort of attempt to go big straight away didn't succeed, right? And actually Denmark took a sort of go-slow approach. Is that right?
Brandon N. Owens:
Well, you took the words right out of my mouth. He, in fact, was correct. The way that we ultimately reached megawatt scale was through incrementally increasing the size of these smaller wind turbines and then gradually interconnecting them to the grid and gradually developing that technology.
But you always started with these robust farm-based systems. In fact, what became Vestas—that technology was very similar to the Jacobs technology. And if you look at the Vestas pathway, the Denmark manufacturer, they started with this very small—I think it was 100 kilowatt system, 110, 120—and through the 80s, they gradually upsized with the technology. And so I think if in the 70s, the initial approach had been, you know, let's take the Jacobs machine and figure out how to increase its size by 15% and go from there, I think Joe Jacobs would have been on board with that. And I think that would have actually led to a lot more success in the US R&D program.
Henry Sanderson:
That's fascinating because that's kind of a lesson, I guess, the West is facing today when we think about competing with China. Do we sort of like go big and build the biggest things we can or kind of incremental improvements? So maybe there's something from history we can learn, right?
Brandon N. Owens:
Yeah, I mean, we've got these large offshore wind turbines now. We're in the tens of megawatts. Now, the question is, where do you go from here? Can they get any bigger? So it'll be interesting to see how that industry evolves from here.
Henry Sanderson:
So just to compare, you said today we're at tens of megawatts. So the original Jacobs turbines were sort of two, three kilowatts, right? What could they actually power on a ranch? What could they actually do?
Brandon N. Owens:
I mean, you're doing lights, radios, things like that. Initially, small motors. And then, you know, you're working your way up to small farm equipment, things like that. I mean, the power needs were pretty modest at that time as well.
Henry Sanderson:
But you...
Henry Sanderson:
You can do a television, right? I guess that was one of the...
Brandon N. Owens:
Yeah, I think probably it wasn't until the 50s that even that was a need.
Henry Sanderson:
Do you think looking back that there was a possibility for a decentralized system that could have incorporated some of these elements?
Brandon N. Owens:
Well, I mean that goes back earlier than the 30s or the 50s. That goes back to the 1890s when the power system was first developing and you had the Pearl Street Station, which is the first power plant in the US. And they ran a DC system which had to be more local because it was lower voltage and you had to eventually transfer over to AC high voltage to go a longer distance. There was this brief window where, look, you could either do kind of these small localized systems with distributed resources, or you could switch over to a larger AC network and then kind of upscale everything, including the machines. And then you could use larger steam turbines. And we ended up opting for the latter and the whole system upscaled. And we went with this centralized hub-and-spoke model. And there was an argument to be made at that point that you could have gone the distributed path. And in that path, wind turbine would have been a major player.
And so we sort of got locked into the centralized hub-and-spoke model. So that decision was made much earlier. The distributed model could have possibly worked when power was at a point where it could have played a role. Denmark did a little bit of that hybrid. They have much more of a decentralized system.
But as I said, we kind of got locked into that centralized system and that decision was made earlier on. And that's what locked wind out by 1910. And wind had been on the sidelines ever since. And the only role that wind was going to possibly play was in the non-grid-connected market.
And that's the role that wind power played in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. And then right around the time that Jacobs was starting to hit its stride in manufacturing and wind was really doing well in the non-grid-connected market, the REA comes out and they start electrifying and expanding the grid. And then that market collapses.
And then that's why you have basically wind is nowhere to be found in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. And then in the 1970s, you have the energy crisis and wind is rediscovered. Right. And they say, oh, wind is important. Let's go build big wind turbines. And then you have all of the drama around that. So it's a really interesting history about wind power, where it was and how we got to where we are now. And Jacobs played a real central role in not only the technology innovation, but all of the drama surrounding that Big Wind / Little Wind sort of dichotomy.
Henry Sanderson:
And he did inspire a lot of people in the 70s who actually went around and repaired some of these machines. I actually chatted to Paul Geip in another episode, who repaired these machines and made them still work.
Brandon N. Owens:
Yeah, yeah, he—they—I mean he was a legend and a lot of folks believed—rightly so—that sort of small wind, off-grid applications is where wind really hit its stride. And those machines worked really well, really reliable and really important. And there were a lot of refurbishing, and as you said, the past was the future. So in the 1970s, folks who were focused on those Jacobs wind turbines—that technology is basically the bedrock of the technology that we have today because it was the incremental upscaling of that technology that has led to the multi-megawatt machines that you see installed across not just the United States, but across the world today.
Henry Sanderson:
So quite a technical innovation then from the brothers in terms of going for that three-blade design, right? And choosing that route.
Brandon N. Owens:
Yeah, yeah, they played a big, big role in the evolution of wind power.
Henry Sanderson:
Well, Brandon, thanks so much for joining me today. It's fascinating to hear your thoughts and I do recommend everyone read your book, The Wind Power Story, which is a fascinating account of wind from the origins to the present day. So thanks for joining me.
Brandon N. Owens:
Thank you so much, pleasure to be here.
