Berlin's Wildly Fantastic 1,400-Foot-High, Hydra-Headed Windmill

Berlin rests in the shadow of a monstrously tall steel tower with a hydra head of spinning fans, each about 500 feet in diameter. A medium-sized town's population climbs over the 1,400-foot-high structure, noshing in a cavernous cafeteria and peering off a cloud-shrouded viewing deck. The city is aglow with great gouts of energy pouring out of the windmill – as much as 130,000,000 kilowatt hours a year – illuminating the anguished faces of once-profitable oil barons now crying into their beer.

This was the ambitious 1930s-era vision of Hermann Honnef, a German engineer with a lifelong obsession with high towers and wind power. Honnef took a known fact, that there were steady, strong currents of air flowing high above the surface of earth, and ran with it to the limits of the human imagination. As you can see in this page from a 1932 copy of Science And Mechanics, dug out of a musty box by the ceaselessly entertaining blog Modern Mechanix, the multifanned windmill would've loom far above any building in existence at the time. Just imagine the bloody mincemeat it would make out of migrating birds, not to mention any unfortunate dirigible pilot sucked into its flailing blade-field.