"The world's largest manufacturer of windmills" — Perkins

The trade magazine's judgment, for 1899

The claim. The Perkins Wind Mill Company of Mishawaka — the windmill works of the businesses file, maker of the mill whose 1869 patent the inventors file confirms from Scientific American — is crowned in the trade magazine Gas Engine Magazine's history of the company as "the world's largest manufacturer of windmills." The judgment is carried, attributed to the magazine, in this history's businesses, inventors, founders, and industrial files, and it travels with numbers the same history supplies: Perkins built 1,500 windmills in 1883 and was selling 5,000 windmills a year by 1899. The numbers are what test the crown, because a rival's numbers survive.

The record. The Aermotor Company of Chicago was founded in 1888 on the all-steel windmill, eleven years before Perkins' peak year. By 1892 — seven years before 1899 — Aermotor was selling 20,000 windmills a year: the figure carried by the Texas Historical Commission's account of the company's South Chicago factory, the ground of the standard company history (Walter S. Gillis, Still Turning: A History of Aermotor Windmills, Texas A&M University Press, 2015, with T. Lindsay Baker's foreword), and the trade's own retrospective on the "windmill war" of 1892 in Farm Collector, which puts Aermotor's projected sales for that year above 60,000 fans and towers. The same class of record calls Aermotor, in those years, "the dominant windmill company in the world." Twenty thousand documented sales against five thousand claimed ones is not a margin a definition can close: the counts are units of the small farm pumping mill on both sides, and while Perkins also built large power mills and engines — the businesses file carries the whole line — the magazine's sentence names no class. On the only common measure the record offers, mills a year, the claim is beaten fourfold, seven years before its own date, by a company a hundred miles away.

The verdict. Not supported — contradicted at unit strength, not merely unproven. No census of the world's windmill output by maker exists for any year of the trade, so the superlative could never have been measured by anyone, the magazine included; but the evidence that does exist runs against it, and the verdict is stated on that evidence rather than on the absence of a perfect instrument. Perkins' true standing needs no crown and stands in the businesses and inventors files at its documented size: one of the substantial American windmill makers, Mishawaka-built from the 1870s into the twentieth century, its machines in the Smithsonian's keeping. The magazine's sentence belongs to the windmill era's trade flattery, of which the 1890s produced a great deal — the Texas commission counts more than seven hundred windmill companies in the trade's long run, and the largest of them, on the record, was in Chicago.

Sources:

1. Gas Engine Magazine, the magazine's history of the Perkins company — the superlative as printed, with the production figures (1,500 mills in 1883; 5,000 a year by 1899) as carried in this history's businesses file.
2. Texas Historical Commission / Texas Time Travel, the Aermotor factory account — "By 1892, Aermotor was selling 20,000 of its 'mathematical' windmills each year"; the commission's count of more than 700 windmill companies, 1854–1920.
3. Walter S. Gillis, Still Turning: A History of Aermotor Windmills (Texas A&M University Press, 2015), as reviewed from the university press record — the company's documented rise on the 1888 steel mill; the Hill County marker text carried with it ("the dominant windmill company in the world").
4. "Windmill war," Farm Collector (2004, via The Free Library) — Aermotor's 1892 sales and its projection of more than 60,000 fans and towers for that year.
5. This history's inventors file — Perkins' windmill patent, U.S. 93,472, confirmed from Scientific American, 10 August 1869.