Immediately we inform the story of Mária Telkes, one of many builders of solar-thermal storage programs. Telkes was so devoted to the world of photo voltaic vitality that whereas she was working on the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise, she earned the nickname the “Sun Queen.” Over her lifetime, she registered greater than 20 patents, practically all associated to harnessing the facility of the solar.
Her innovations that utilized photo voltaic vitality included an oven, a desalination gadget and one of many first solar-heated homes, the Dover Sun House, constructed in 1948. We heard about Mária Telkes from Erin Twamley, a youngsters’s e-book creator who shares the tales, careers and the superpowers of on a regular basis ladies. She stated she would like to see Telkes in each fifth grade classroom to encourage younger folks.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Johanna Mayer: In 1948, an odd home appeared in Dover, Massachusetts.
Immediately, Dover is a well-to-do suburb of Boston, but it surely was rural farm nation. Slender roads, yawning inexperienced lawns, fields with horses. The homes tended to be stately Colonials, or perhaps the newer ranch model.
So when this new home went up… it caught out. Massive time.
Some say the home resembled a wedge of cheese. Think about shopping for a triangular wedge of cheddar and inserting it on the desk with the vast aspect dealing with down. That’s the form of this home. The slanted a part of the cheese wedge – the again of the home – seemed pretty regular, with brown siding and a few home windows. However the different aspect of the wedge – the place the rind can be – was a futuristic house home. It was lined edge to edge with eighteen 10-foot-tall, imposing glass home windows… designed to beckon within the solar.
I’m Johanna Mayer, and that is From Our Inbox, a collection from Misplaced Girls of Science. This uncommon residence was known as the Dover Solar Home. And it was the brainchild of Hungarian-American biophysicist Mária Telkes.
Erin Twamley:  My title is Erin Twamley. I’m a youngsters’s e-book creator who likes to share the tales, careers, and superpowers of on a regular basis ladies.
Johanna Mayer: Erin writes books about what she calls “everyday superheroes” – ladies who work in STEM, or science, know-how, engineering, and math. It was Erin who first wrote to us about Mária Telkes.
Erin Twamley: I might love Dr. Maria to be in each fifth grade classroom. Dr. Maria actually helped to form a few of our understanding of what we are able to do with solar energy.
Johanna Mayer: Mária Telkes was born in Hungary in 1900, and received thinking about photo voltaic vitality whereas learning on the College of Budapest. By 1924, she’d gotten her PhD in bodily chemistry, and he or she determined to maneuver to the US to work as a biophysicist on the famend Cleveland Clinic. Biophysicists typically apply the ideas of physics and math to organic programs – for instance, when she was on the Cleveland Clinic, Mária labored on a photoelectric machine that recorded mind waves.
After just a few years, she moved to MIT. And he or she grew to become so devoted to the world of photo voltaic, that she quickly earned a nickname: the Solar Queen.
Over her lifetime, the Solar Queen would earn greater than 20 patents, practically all of which needed to do with harnessing the facility of that nice huge burning ball within the sky.
Erin Twamley: I believe one of many neatest issues that she got here up with is named one of many first photo voltaic ovens that might be simple to make use of, and that might be utilized in distant locations.
Michelle Addington: This one is close to and pricey to my coronary heart as a result of I constructed a conveyable, light-weight photo voltaic oven once I was a mechanical engineering pupil.
Johanna Mayer: That is Michelle Addington – she’s the previous Dean of the College of Texas at Austin Faculty of Structure.
Michelle Addington: We can not comprehend the gorgeous quantity of thermal vitality that’s contained within the solar. We do not come near comprehending it.
Johanna Mayer: Mária used this remark to construct an ingeniously easy photo voltaic oven. Mainly, it was that insulated room with a window, shrunk all the way down to oven dimension. Steel plates and mirrors contained in the field captured the photo voltaic wavelengths that got here via the glass window – and the oven would warmth as much as 350 levels. Throughout an indication of the oven, Mária stated, “Everything seems to taste so much better when it is cooked by the sun.”
When World Conflict II broke out, Mária was quickly reassigned to the U.S. Workplace of Scientific Analysis and Growth. And he or she was tasked with fixing a significant issue: American troopers, stranded within the Pacific theater, had been dying of dehydration. As soon as once more, Mária turned to the solar.
Michelle Addington: You are taking your saltwater. You type of unfold it on a floor ideally a black floor the place it is going to obtain direct solar. The water will evaporate. Clearly the salt will probably be left behind. So the water evaporates and it will gather on a floor that is above it. As a consequence of floor rigidity or friction, because the water vapor collects on that floor, it should begin to condense.
Johanna Mayer: And voila – drinkable water. The navy would finally embrace her photo voltaic desalination gadget in its official standard-issue emergency medical kits.
And in 1948, Dr. Mária Telkes turned her focus to what would maybe be her most bold mission but: the Dover Solar Home.That unusual, cheese-shaped home with a row of 18 home windows, designed to make use of photo voltaic vitality to warmth a house.
The home was funded by the philanthropist Amelia Peabody and with the assistance of the outstanding architect Eleanor Raymond, Mária designed a home match for a Solar Queen.
Right here’s the way it labored. These home windows? They had been solar collectors. There have been two layers of glass, separated by some airspace and backed by a black sheet of metallic. Because the solar shined, the air in that house would heat up. And Mária put big vats of Glauber salts close to that heat air.
Michelle Addington: And so what would occur is these type of salts started to liquefy. They had been absorbing and absorbing and absorbing and absorbing and absorbing warmth. They mainly functioned as a battery. , so if there was no place for them to dump the warmth, you already know, they’d simply maintain going increasingly more liquid.
Johanna Mayer: So how do you extract the nice and cozy air from these salts?
Michelle Addington: Merely simply type of cross air over that. If you happen to handed air over that, you began to chill down these massive containers of salts. You’d warmth up the air as you had been cooling down the vats of salts, as they had been giving up their warmth.
Johanna Mayer: Followers circulated that heat air all through the home.
Michelle Addington: This allowed for steady situations; it acted as a improbable battery, uh, and it might operate for quite a lot of days with out having solar on it due to the quantity of vitality that was contained inside this type of massive assortment of vats.
Johanna Mayer: For 2 years, the home functioned just about as deliberate. A household moved in, and took up residence within the cheese-shaped Solar Home, giving excursions to reporters and curious rubberneckers alike. It was the one residence on this planet heated fully by solar energy. However through the third New England winter, chilly laborious actuality set in.
Michelle Addington: Two issues: The salts themselves are extraordinarily alkaline and subsequently given to corrosion. And corrosion is definitely what sunk the mission.
Johanna Mayer: Finally, due to the limitless melting and cooling and recrystallizing of the Glauber salts, the substance wasn’t being blended correctly.
And the opposite downside? Nicely, it’s one which perhaps wasn’t prime of thoughts for Mária again within the ‘40s, but is essential for us to think about today.
Michelle Addington: The biggest problem is the fact that cooling is one of our our biggest needs. So much of the focus, of the entire passive solar movement, a lot of natural systems for buildings was built on the assumption that we needed heat. That’s not the world that we’re in. It’s easy to heat. It’s really hard, takes much more energy to cool, three times more energy to move a BTU of heat out of a building than it is to put a BTU of heat into a building.
Johanna Mayer: By 1954, the Sun House’s photo voltaic heating system formally went darkish. However Mária Telkes wasn’t discouraged. The Solar Queen knew that no single home might reply the world’s solar energy points.
She as soon as stated: “The problem of the sun-heated house cannot be solved by one or two experimental houses. But each new house is another experimental stepping stone toward the use of the sun as a fuel resource.”
Dr. Mária Telkes died in 1995, at age 94. However her legacy lives on. Immediately, the variety of folks putting in photo voltaic panels of their houses is constantly rising – and in a latest Pew research, 39% of householders surveyed stated they had been severely contemplating going photo voltaic.
And to these folks nonetheless contemplating… I’ll depart you with the Solar Queen’s personal phrases, from 1951: She wrote: “Sunlight will be used as a source of energy sooner or later anyway. Why wait?”
Katie Hafner: Because of Erin Twamley for writing to us about Dr. Mária Telkes. If you wish to be taught extra about her youngsters’s e-book collection on ladies who work in STEM, try her web site. There’s a link in our episode description.
This episode of Misplaced Girls of Science: From Our Inbox was produced by Johanna Mayer and engineered by Aaron Peterson. The senior producer was Erica Huang. Our government producers are Amy Scharf, and myself, Katie Hafner. Lizzy Younan composes our music. We get our funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Basis and Schmidt Futures. And Paula Mangin did our fantastic From Our Inbox artwork. PRX distributes us and our publishing accomplice is Scientific American.
Right here at Misplaced Girls of Science, it’s our aim to rescue feminine scientists from the jaws of obscurity, however we want your assist! If you already know of a feminine scientist who’s been misplaced to historical past, tell us! You’ll be able to go to our web site to ship us an electronic mail at misplaced ladies of science dot org. You may additionally discover the telephone quantity to our tip line. We love getting calls to the tip line. I’m Katie Hafner. Thanks for listening.
Thanks for listening.
Additional studying:
Libguides: MIT Buildings: Dover Sun House.” Dover Solar Home – MIT Buildings – LibGuides at MIT Libraries, libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=175920&p=1160875.
Nemethy, Andrew. “In 1948, We Were Human Guinea Pigs in the Strangest House in Dover – The Boston Globe.” BostonGlobe.Com, The Boston Globe, 20 Mar. 2019. ww.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2019/03/20/were-human-guinea-pigs-strangest-house-dover/mxDe6r7xWHg3oMhUjDntPN/story.html
“The Marvelously Inventive Life of Mária Telkes.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, March 17,2023
www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/sun-queen-marvelously-inventive-life-maria-telkes/
