Back in 2000, here in southern California the local power companies got together and decided to start putting the screws into what they assumed to be a helpless and passive population of customers.
In an effort to prove them sadly mistaken, I dusted off an old idea of mine. The idea was to generate clean electricity by mechanically capturing, storing and amplifying the tremendous force of large trees as they swayed back and forth in the wind. I had hands on experience of the forces involved as a 30 year veteran of the tree service industry, most of it in performing large take downs.
I built a very crude prototype utilizing various parts I had lying around in the garage, and succeeded in putting one together that proved the basic principle. Now I was ready to patent the idea so that I could put one together more suitable for commercial production. My attorney did a wonderful job, and I began work on a real prototype which I called a Tree Slave. It basicly consisted of a wire cable attached to a large tree 3/4 of the way up with an eyebolt through the main trunk.
100 feet upwind of the tree I poured a concrete pad on which I bolted my new machine. The machine had a 6 foot ratcheting arm to which I attached the opposite end of my cable. As the tree swayed in the wind it moved the ratchet arm forward and it's return spring brought it back to its original position. This reciprocating motion was used to bind a series of spring motors in the main drive drum of the machine. A timing mechanism kept track of how many turns of the binding axle were achieved before it activated a cam that dislodged a retension arm allowing the main drum to spin and generate electricity.
The machine worked well putting out 6.000 watts of clean power for over 2 minutes each cycle. The patent was granted ( # 6,825,574 uspto.gov ) and I began work on a second prototype that would slave 6 generation stations to one binding axle in an attempt generate constant power as opposed to pulses of power. It was at this time when a smart alick friend of mine said, " Jon what you need is a tree that falls down and stands back up! ". Later that day it hit me like Coulter pine cone to the head that he was right! I immediately began work on a small scale Pendulating Land Sail.
It consisted of a six foot square sail ( retracting window shade ) attached to a mast ( steel radio antenna pole ) with a hole through it 3 feet from the bottom into which I inserted an axle ( 1/2 in. greased steel rod ). By cutting the kids pull up bar in half and inserting the axle into the lateral section, I then attached a counter weight ( 20 gallon bucket of rocks ) to the bottom of the mast.
I eagerly watched as the wind blew this contraption over and lifted the bucket of rocks into the air, as the wind died and the sail returned to its upright position, I gleefully realized that I could utilize the changing orientation of the bucket to the lower mast attachment to pull sail and dump air as the sail blew over. Off I went to the hardware store for springs, small pulleys and nylon cord. It was very shortly thereafter that I watched in amazement as this homemade contraption blew over and stood right back up again in a constant breeze.
And so it was that I got into my trusty old truck and sped off to my patent attorney's office thinking to myself, " I'll show those so and so's at the power company who's helpless and passive! "
Any thoughts that you rebels out there have on this crazy new form of clean power generation will be appreciated.
JoMoCo