Eclipse Windmill

The Eclipse windmill was one of the most successful windmill designs used to pump water on farms and ranches across the nineteenth-century United States. Leonard Wheeler, a Presbyterian minister working as a missionary among the Ojibwe on the south shore of Lake Superior, perfected the device on his own homestead over nearly two decades of quiet tinkering, unknown to the wider engineering world, before ill health forced him to move to the industrial city of Beloit, Wisconsin in 1866, where he was persuaded to patent it; he received United States Patent No. 68,674 on September 10, 1867. Wheeler died before seeing his invention's full success, but his sons carried the business forward, and companies descended from the original Eclipse Windmill Company were still operating well into the 21st century.