If you think that solar power is some kind of 1970s hippie or Silicon Valley idea, then you’re a century late to the party. Let’s go back in time, to a soot-choked France in the mid-1800s, to find the real origins of solar power.
There, a math professor, Augustin Mouchot, decided to have an existential crisis about coal. Mouchot was teaching maths at the École Navale in Brest, France but he had a side project. He decided that the frantic Industrial Revolution happening all around him was about to run out of coal. What could possibly replace the 140 million tonnes of coal that Europe burned in 1850 or the 500 million tonnes that it would be burning 100 years later?
Mouchot went back to his library and started researching every possible source of energy on the planet. Then and only then, did he start thinking about the sun. It was the perfect place to look, since it’s 99 per cent the primary energy source for all Earthly processes. Mouchot’s next move was a classic case of steampunk thinking: he went to his local hardware store and ordered a ton of polished silver and copper mirrors. He cut them into pieces that fit into a jigsaw puzzle of a cone, which was then covered in a mesh of tiny, delicately crafted little beams. This was Mouchot’s genius idea: the cone was supposed to act like a giant sunflower, following the sun’s movement during the day. His finished machine, the ‘Pouvoir Solaire’, had a cone made of about 1, 200 shiny little pieces of metal, with 100 of them replaced by glass and some expensive silk threads to cover the inner surface of the cone.
Once the cone was finished, Mouchot had to deal with the designing problem of how to connect it to the motor he planned to build. He decided to use two small steam engines that he had built. The two steam engines powered two massive flywheels, which were connected to the machine by a gear system. Mouchot’s machine produced a large amount of steam by concentrating the sunlight and boiling water in a glass-covered boiler and it had a reasonably high efficiency, with about 2.2 per cent of the sunlight hitting the mirror actually producing work. For Solar Panel Installation Portishead, contact //redbridgeandsons.co.uk/solar-pv-panels/solar-panel-installation-portishead/
It’s an extraordinary feat of 19th-century designing. By 1878, Mouchot had put together a steam solar engine that was bigger, better and still not particularly efficient. He arrived in Paris to participate in the World Exposition, which attracted more than 32 million visitors that year and decided to put on a show for the public. Mouchot had built his new steam solar engine to be about 100 per cent more powerful than his first machine and he installed it in a giant pavilion on the Exposition’s grounds.
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