A 40-foot mill, erected at Fowler, Indiana, in 1881, is running the following machinery: 

“I have a universal wood worker, four side, one 34-inch planer, jig saw, and lathe, also a No. 4 American grinder, and with a good, fair wind I can run all the machines at one time.  I can work about four days and nights each week.  It is easy to control in high winds.”

A 60-foot diameter mill of similar pattern was erected in Steel County, Minnesota, in 1867.  The owner gives the following history of this mill: 

“I have run this wind flouring mill since 1867 with excellent success.  It runs 3 sets of burrs, one 4 feet, one 31/2 feet, and one 33 inches.  Also 2 smutters, 2 bolts, and all the necessary machinery to make the mill complete.  A 15-mile wind runs everything in good shape.  One wind wheel was broken by a tornado in 1870, and another in 1881 from same cause.  Aside from these two, which cost $250 each, and a month’s lost time, the power did not cost over $10 a year for repairs.  In July, 1833, a cyclone passed over this section, wrecking my will as well as everything else in its track, and having (out of the profits of the wind mill) purchased a large water and steam flouring mill here, I last fall moved the wind mill out to Dakota, where I have it running in first-class shape and doing a good business.  The few tornado wrecks make me think none the less of wind mills, as my water power has cost me four times as much in 6 years as the wind power has in 16 years.”

There are very few of these large mills in use in this country, but there are a great many from 14 to 30 feet in diameter in use, and their numbers are rapidly increasing as their merits become known.  The field for the use of wind mills is almost unlimited, and embraces pumping water, drainage, irrigation, elevating, grinding, shelling, and cleaning grain, ginning cotton, sawing wood, churning, running stamp mills, and charging electrical accumulators.  This last may be the solution of the St. Louis gas question.

In the writer’s opinion the settlement of the great tableland lying between the Mississippi Valley and the Rocky Mountains, and extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Red River of the North, would be greatly retarded, if not entirely impracticable, in large sections where no water is found at less than 100 to 500 feet below the surface, if it were not for the American wind mill; large cattle ranges without any surface water have been made available by the use of wind mills.  Water pumped out of the ground remains about the same temperature during the year, and is much better for cattle than surface water.  It yet remains in the future to determine what the wind mill will not do with the improvements that are being made from to time.

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THE PNEUMATIC DYNAMITE GUN.