In 1979 NASA built the world's biggest (at the time) windmill.
Actually they built four of them. One of these was built on the island of Culebra which is geographically part of the U.S. Virgin Islands but administered by Puerto Rico.
Culebra is a beautiful island.
It has a small town, Dewey, situated on a hurricane-proof harbor.
One-half the island is an old naval gunnery range;
the other half is the Theodore Roosevelt Bird Sanctuary.
To make a short story longer; NASA built a gold-plated white elephant for $2,000,000 ($16,000,000 in today's dollars) of taxpayer's money.
It stood 160 feet tall and weighed 35,000 pounds.
It was as big as a city bus suspended 100 feet in the air!
When it wouldn't work as it should (since it was out in the middle
of nowhere in a corrosive salt environment), the General Services
Administration auctioned it off to a private citizen for $2,000.
(The government earns a return on your money of negative 10,000%!)
City Museum has now acquired this colossal white elephant
(yes NASA painted it white) and it is now erected
(without the tower) inside City Museum.
It doesn't have the original blades because they got left behind
and were presumably destoyed in Hurricane Hugo.
But it does some extrordinary work.
Fully reconfigured, it lifts a 20,000 pound block of granite
forty feet in the air and lets it back down again!




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