For many decades, just about every farm in the Midwest sported its own windmill to provide electricity. In most cases, those windmills were built because there was no electrical service on the farms, and the power was needed to help pump water for the cattle.
When the Rural Electric Association’s cooperatives brought electrical power to the nation’s farmers in the 1940s, a large number of the windmills remained in place pumping water, but soon farmers found it was just as easy to hook up their pumps to the power grid and pay for the power to run them. The windmills that remained fell into disrepair, and most were eventually torn down.
This was a perfect example of how progress came to Middle America. Farmers had electricity, and with it, the creature comforts it provided, like refrigerators, heat, freezers, etc. Their lives were notably improved. Windmills weren’t needed because someone had found a better way to do things.
Try driving through rural areas now. Multi-lane highways make your trip easier, but you still see farms. Most likely, there is no windmill next to the barn.
Instead, there may be a field nearby filled with windmills of a different kind. They’re not there to pump water. The electricity they generate is likely to be going to those same farms, but now they power everything.
Someone – we may never know who – decided that the old way of doing things made a lot of sense. The technology was upgraded and re-applied. Now we have an alternative to the old, universally accepted ways of creating electricity. New technology is being used, but it’s being applied to an old, old idea and the result, while the jury may still be out, is promising.
Could this happen in the media business? Could some human beings of supreme intelligence take over the reigns of radio and television and breathe some much-needed life into them by going back to the old ways of serving the community and providing a quality product using today’s technology?
The answer, of course, is “yes.”
The bigger question is, why don’t they?
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