Many people believe that our experiments with solar energy in America date to the energy crisis of the 1970s. Yet from 1906 until his death in 1918, a Philadelphia inventor named Frank Shuman came close to making viable solar energy a reality.
Shuman was best known as the inventor of wire-reinforced glass, which proved to be of immense value for Victorian-era building projects. But Shuman had many interests, and he promoted his latest and most visionary experiment in a pamphlet from 1907 entitled The Direct Acting Solar Engine : The Prime Mover of the Immediate Future. He writes:
All of the coal we are burning is merely the stored-up power of the sun delivered on the earth some millions of years ago. We dig far into the ground to get this out, whereas the sun is delivering an equal power every day, right at our doors, free of all charge. It is only necessary for us to devise the proper means for receiving this infinite power and using it to advantage.
Devising the means to take advantage of solar energy was the hard part, and Frank Shuman was by no means the first person to make such an attempt. Augustin Mouchot had built the first large-scale solar engines in Europe in the 1870s, and John Ericsson also experimented with solar engines in the United States during the 1870s and 1880s. Yet their engines ultimately could not compete economically with coal as a source of energy.
Unlike his predecessors, however, Shuman found the means to cheaply and efficiently harness the sun’s energy and to minimize its inherent drawbacks by employing a “hot box” instead of mirrors that concentrated the sun’s rays. He would go on to modify and improve what is now recognized as the first commercially viable solar engine, and his Sun Power Company commenced operations on a large scale in Maadi, Egypt, beginning in 1913. Unfortunately, World War I would ultimately derail this undertaking.
Frank Shuman showed the world that solar power was practicable, and it all started with the invention of his first engine in the Tacony neighborhood of Philadelphia, publicized in this document from 1907.
Read a digital version of The Direct Acting Solar Engine
SOURCES
Ackermann, A. S. E. 1916. “The Utilization of Solar Energy”. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1915. 24: 141-166.
Kryza, Frank T. The Power of Light : The Epic Story of Man’s Quest to Harness the Sun. New York: McGraw Hill, 2003.
Shuman, Frank. The Direct Acting Solar Engine : the Prime Mover of the Immediate Future. Philadelphia: Review Pub. & Printing Co., [1907]
“American Inventor Uses Egypt’s Sun for Power,” New York Times, July 2, 1916