Augustin Mouchot's Solar Concentrator at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, 1878.





2. Solar-powered steam engine, 1882
French inventor Abel Pifre and his solar powered printing press. Image from Scientific American, May 1882.

On August 6, 1882 Abel Pifre showed off his invention at the Gardens of the Tuilleries in Paris. Pifre’s machine brought 50 liters of water to a boil in just under an hour, driving a 2/5ths horsepower engine that was attached to his printing press. The inventor was reportedly able to print up to 500 copies an hour of his Soleil-Journal, or “Sun Journal.”

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The futuristic solar power plant of a German inventor, as imagined in the October 1923 issue of Science and Invention magazine



In a short article called “Electricity From the Sun,” the October 1923 issue of Science and Invention magazine told the story of a German dream to build a gigantic lens that would be able to harness the sun and convert its energy into electricity for an entire town.
The lens would be mounted on an enormous swiveling hinge that would be timed to follow the sun, much like the rotating “follow the sun” houses imagined in the 1950s.

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2. Back to the future: Solar genius Frank Shuman


"… In 1912 they invited Shuman to build a giant sunengine in Maadi, Egypt, a southern suburb of Cairo. Maadi was designed by the British to be upscale and Western, with wide boulevards, large houses, spacious yards, and luscious gardens. Sun there was plentiful; coal was not.