The appearance of this hit and miss engine is guaranteed to grab your attention. Even someone who’s never heard of a water hopper and couldn’t care less what one is, would likely wonder; “What is that thing?”. When I spotted this engine at last year’s Steam Expo. I wasn’t sure it was a water hopper at all. As you can tell from these photos, the top was above my line of sight and the fins are not very wide. I thought it might be an attempt at an air cooled heat sink. Is that what they mean by the AERmotor? All that aside, the experts at Gas Engine Magazine say it’s a water hopper so a water hopper it is.
Gas engines were a short lived sideline for the Aermotor Co. The name refers to a machine that is literally an AIR motor, more commonly known as a windmill. About 1883 a Chicago based company that manufactured dictionary stands and farm machinery hired an engineer by the name of Thomas Perry to assist with the development of a new grain binder but Perry was more interested in developing another project. Before he was hired by LaVerne Noyes he was employed by the U.S. Wind Energy Co. of Batavia, Illinois where he had done extensive testing on wind wheel design. Using what amounted to a primitive wind tunnel, he had tested 61 different wind wheel designs and had come up with a steel wind wheel that was 87% more efficient than the wooden wheels then being produced.
Incredibly, the management at his former employment had not been interested in what Perry had developed but Noyes definitely was. Perry was given a green light to continue his work on windmills and by 1888 the Aermotor Windmill was offered for sale. Sales were lackluster that first year with a mere twenty-four windmills being sold, but by 1890 a new factory was under construction that was dedicated to production of Aermotor windmills. By 1892 an expansion of those facilities was required to meet the demand for the new “Scientific” windmill.
If you can manufacture steel towers for windmills, towers for other applications is a natural direction for expansion. Aermotor made towers for a variety of government agencies that included the Army Corp. of Engineers, the Geodetic Survey and the Forest Service. They also produced electrical transmission towers for high voltage power lines. From the early 1900’s into the 1940’s they manufactured gas engines like this one. They also produced electric generators and water pumps but windmills always remained their primary business.
In 1958 the company was sold to Motor Products Corporation located in Detroit, Michigan. In the years that followed the company changed ownership a number of times, including a move offshore to Argentina. In 2006 a group of ranchers in Texas bought the firm and returned production to the United States at a factory located in San Angelo, Texas where it remains today. If you’re in the market for a “Scientific” windmill visit their website at: www.aermotorwindmill.com . You won’t however be able to buy a gasoline engine like this one.
Sources:
www.gasenginemagazine.com Circa 1920 Aermotor 2 ½ hp general purpose engine by Glenn Thompson Aug. / Sept. 2018
https://aermotorwindmill.com/pages/a-history-were-proud-of
Ed. Note: The astute reader may note a difference in the appearance of this post, that's because it was done on the new and improved Blogger. Like everything that's being produced by the current "tech." industry it's a miserable CF.
