Search

This paper traces the origins of two technological trajectories in the contemporary history of wind power technology: the American Smith-Putnam Wind Turbine and the Danish Gedser Wind Turbine. Describing the two wind turbine projects in terms of their technical design characteristics, the professional background of the individuals involved, the organizational features of the technological knowledge production, and the historical context, the paper builds on the notion of technological trajectories in the making as a means of identifying emerging selection mechanisms for possible engineering problem solutions, scientific methods, material artifacts, and financial assessment techniques. Conceived during the Great Depression and World War II, respectively, both projects promoted the idea that wind power could make a cost-effective contribution to the existing electric utility system. The two projects resulted in distinctive wind turbine innovations that paved the way for two technological trajectories in the contemporary history of wind power. Studying the emergence of technological trajectories, it is argued, requires the historian of technology to attend to well-known features of technological design and its cultural context that in retrospect appear to be significant, but also to tackle the creation of novelty and the inevitability of technological uncertainties about which the logic of trajectories has little to say. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]