Marcellus Jacobs

Marcellus Jacobs was an American engineer who, together with his brother Joe, built one of the most widely used early wind turbines for rural electricity generation. Working on the family ranch in Montana, the brothers adapted a windmill by fitting it with a propeller taken from surplus World War One aircraft engines, eventually settling on a three blade design, and their 1922 installation drew enough local interest that they founded the Jacobs Wind Electric Company to produce it commercially. The brothers relocated the company to Minneapolis in 1931, and roughly twenty thousand Jacobs wind generators were eventually produced and distributed across North America and beyond, including a unit that explorer Richard Byrd installed at his Little America base in Antarctica in 1933, where it continued operating for more than two decades.