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Solar-powered steam engines, an unlikely hallmark of the Victorian era

When most of us think of solar power, it is those gray silicon panels that power devices on desert highways in Arizona or Nevada that come to mind, not the steam engines in Abraham’s presidency. Lincoln. Solar energy is a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st centuries, not the 19th. Or is that it?

The history of solar energy actually dates back two millennia. It reached a peak in popularity among engineers and inventors in that period of marvelous scientific adventure that flourished in the mid- to late-19th century.

Steam-powered trains ran on elevated railroads in American cities, and urban streets were lit up again with electricity. It was then that the visionary scientists turned to look to the sky in search of a new source of inexhaustible energy. The story of solar energy in the Victorian era is one that is rarely told. It’s a gripping story, and part of it even has a direct personal connection to Abraham Lincoln.

Swedish engineer and inventor John Ericsson made a name for himself in the United States when he produced, for the Union Army, the battleship battleship. Monitor. This is the warship that defeated the Confederate CSS Virginia (best remembered today by the name given to him by the Union forces: the Merrimack). It was Ericsson, as part of a contract awarded to him by President Lincoln himself, who designed and built the Monitor, who faced the Merrimack at the Battle of Hampton Roads in March 1862, producing a Union victory that many historians believe was a decisive turning point in the Civil War.

John Ericsson used his shipbuilding skills and other engineering skills to help finance design work that was much more important to him than ships, but was not earning him money. Ericcson was obsessed with creating what he called a “solar engine,” by which he referred to a steam engine powerful enough to do useful work by converting sunlight into mechanical energy. He managed to make several prototypes.

Ericsson’s solar machines had three main characteristics. First, he designed a conical mirror to focus sunlight on a central axis (think of an inverted umbrella with the handle pointed directly at the sun; the mirror was in the concave hollow of the umbrella, reflecting sunlight back toward the stem). He built a tube-shaped boiler in the focus of the mirror attached to a small steam engine.

“Directed at the sun,” Ericcson explained to a newspaper interviewer in 1870, “the light is concentrated on the metal tube in the same way that a magnifying glass can focus a hot spot of light on a sheet of paper to set it on fire. “

Ericcson was able to make a device that operated a piston steam engine that generated a few horsepower. Although it was not a toy, it was only useful for operating small machinery such as a lathe or an industrial fan. Magnification was a problem because the size of the mirror became unwieldy.

Ericsson’s work never went much beyond the full-scale model stage, but it was he who provided the inspiration for a man of far grander, some would say grand, ambitions. It was about Frank Shuman, a self-taught Brooklyn-born inventor who aspired to build a 1000-horsepower, apple-sized solar steam engine to pump water from the Nile River into parched Egyptian cotton fields.

Frank Shuman had become a billionaire before age 30 by solving a serious and deadly problem that plagued train stations and other large public buildings in America. Before cheap interior lighting, all these buildings had huge glass skylights to illuminate their interiors, and when snow or wind, or a stone thrown by a malicious teenager, smashed the glass skylight, spear-shaped shards rained down. on those below as weapons, maiming and sometimes killing them. The newspapers of the 1850s and 1860s are full of stories of this kind.

Shuman’s solution? A product he called “safety glass” that he made by sandwiching two sheets of inexpensive Pittsburgh flat glass bonded together with a clear rubber cement compound. The safety glass didn’t shatter into a million pieces when it broke. Rather, it crumpled like a tight sheet of paper. Safety glass is used to this day in car windshields and safety glasses. Shuman was handsomely rewarded for this life-saving invention, allowing him, like Ericcson before him, to devote all of his personal time and wealth to his pet obsession – gigantic solar-powered steam engines.

Why do so few of us today know Frank Shuman and John Ericsson? Perhaps it’s because the science we remember from the 19th century, the well-known stories of Edison and Marconi, Diesel and Westinghouse, is the science that has become mainstream, the science that impacts our daily lives. The history of solar energy a century ago has been forgotten, perhaps because many even today dismiss solar energy as a fringe technology, one that does not (or perhaps cannot) have a transformative impact on our lives.

Fortunately, there are several good non-technical books on the market and in libraries that relate this fascinating history of solar energy before 1900. A theme of many of these books is that solar steam technology developed more than a century ago is finally being developed. generalizing. Too many of us still think that the history of solar energy began at the end of WWII.

Solar-powered steam fell into depression after World War I, but now, as many Californians who, like myself, have traveled through Barstow can see first-hand, solar steam is undergoing a timely rebirth. Solar power in Barstow and others in Spain and other sunny nations can produce 12 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 10,000 homes, and it appears that steam from solar energy may once again pose a challenge for other forms of energy.

Perhaps one day solar steam engines will even pump life-giving water into Egyptian cotton fields? History has shown us that it is never a good idea to underestimate the power of technology and perseverance.

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