This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
It was not so tall as the Tower of Babel, but it was more ambitious. Like any good American project, Bobo's Folly was designed to get work done.
Rubin Bobo was an amateur inventor. Shortly after World War I, he came to Davenport with a plan for producing cheap electric power by harnessing the wind. Using money from one hundred and twenty local investors, Bobo built a tall smokestack in the west end of Davenport between the railroad tracks and the Mississippi River. His windstack, as he called it, stood 254 feet high, and used twenty tons of reinforced steel inside three-foot-thick concrete walls.
The mechanics were simple. You know how a small fire in a fireplace produces a draft that draws smoke up and out the chimney. In Bobo's tall windstack, such a draft would be powerful enough to turn a turbine which would generate enough electricity to power half of Davenport.
By the early 1920s, Bobo was ready. He lit a small fire at the base of the chimney. Soon, small wisps of smoke came out the top. There was a roaring sound inside. After a few minutes, the turbine began moving slowly, then faster. But not fast enough. At its best, Bobo's invention produced only 12 horsepower, enough to run one wood lathe.
Investors refused to throw good money after bad. In the end, Rubin Bobo and his wife were reduced to live by weaving other people's rags into rugs for fifty cents a yard. A disillusioned Bobo died in 1953, but Bobo's Folly, as it came to be known, stood for another 35 years.
Would it have worked? In 1970, workmen from a nearby factory burned some trash inside the wind machine to see what would happen. The burning trash shot out to top of the stack with such force that pieces landed out on Credit Island still burning. By then, German engineers had several similar chimneys working well in Europe.
There was some talk of using Bobo's Folly as a landmark to rival the waterfront Arch in St. Louis, but no one could figure out how to make the contraption give rides to tourists up to a restaurant on top.
In 1988, Bobo's Folly was tipped sideways and destroyed to make room for progress. We Rock Islanders have a motto: "If it doesn't work, break it."
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
