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Welcome To Our "Selected Works of
Kurt Saxon & Other Fine Folk" Section

Solar Power of The Past
The Text & Illustrations For This Web Page Were Taken From
THE SURVIVOR; Volume 3: pages 994 through 996

In CENTURY MAGAZINE, Dec. 1884, I found these excerpt from an article on astronomy. Harnessing the sun's energy is an idea known by the ancients. The mirrors of Archimedes burned the Roman fleet at Syracuse about 200 B.C. For other examples see page 17. Vol. 1 of THE SURVIVOR. (Burning glass. Burning mirror and Polyzonal lens.)

In this article you will see that the parabolic mirror was not only as sophisticated as modern mirrors, but a demonstrator model was actually harnessed to run a printing press. The writer, S.P. Langley, admitted that such sun engines were not economical at that time, but he predicted a time in the future would come when coal would be exhausted and solar engines would be the thing. He gave England 300 years of coal, although, at the present rate of use, it will not last nearly that long. Also, he was apparently ignorant of the fact that the projected abundance of coal is misleading, since however much there actually is, the deeper one has to dig for it, the more expensive it becomes. Consequently, if England and the rest of the world had 1000 years supply of coal, it will soon be so hard to get at and so expensive that 950 years supply might just as well be on the moon.

An interesting thing in the article is that Langly seemed to have no knowledge of petroleum, which, with the internal combustion engine, replaced the majority of coal use. Had he known of petroleum and the projected amounts of it, he might have given the world a 600 years supply of available energy. He obviously knew more about the sun and solar power than he knew of economics, population growth and its consequent drain of fossil fuel.

See also Burning-glass, Burning-mirror and Polyzonal
Lens on pages 404-405 of Survivor Vol. 1

THE SUN'S ENERGY
by S.P. Langley

One certain thing is this—that we cannot by any contrivance raise the temperature in the focus of any lens or mirror beyond that of its source (practically we cannot do even so much); we cannot, for instance, by any burning-lens make the image of a candle as hot as the original flame. Whatever a thermometer may read when the candle-heat is concentrated on its bulb by a lens, it would read yet more if the bulb were dipped in the candle-flame itself; and one obvious application of this fact is that, though we cannot dip our thermometer in the sun, we know that if we could do so the temperature would at least be greater than any we get by the largest burning-glass. We need have no fear of making the burning-glass too big; the temperature at its solar focus is always and necessarily lower than that of the sun itself.

For some reason no very great burning-lens or mirror has been constructed for a long time, and we have to go back to the eighteenth century to see what can be done in this way. The annexed figure (Fig. 8) is from a wood-cut of the last century, describing the largest burning-lens then or since constructed in France, whose size and mode of use the drawing clearly shows. All the heat falling OB the great lens was concentrated on a smaller one, and the smaller one concentrated it in turn, till at the very focus we are assured that iron, gold, and other metals ran like melted butter. In England, the largest burning-lens on record was made about the same time by an optician named Parker for the English Government, who designed it as a present to be taken by Lord Macartney's embassy to the Emperor of China. Parker's lens was three feet in diameter and very massive, being seven inches thick at the center. In its focus the most refractory substances were fused, and even the diamond was reduced to vapor, so that the temperature of the sun's surface is at any rate higher than this.

What became of the French lens shown, it would he interesting to know. If it is still above ground, its fate has been better than that of the English one. It is said that the Emperor of China, when he got his lens, was much alarmed by it, as being possibly sent him by the English with some covert design for his injury. By way of a test, a smith was ordered to strike it with his hammer; but the hammer rebounded from the solid glass, and this was taken to be conclusive evidence of magic in the thing, which was immediately buried, and probably is still reposing under the soil of the Celestial Flowery Kingdom.

Fig. 8 BURNIEL

WE have, in all that has preceded, been speaking of the sun's constitution and appearance, and have hardly entered on the question of its industrial relations to man. It must be evident, however, that if we derive, as it is asserted we do, almost all our mechanical power from this solar heat,— if our water-wheel is driven by rivers which the sun feeds by the rain he sucks up for them into the clouds, if the coal is stored sun-power, and if, as Stevenson said, it really is the sun which drives our engines, though at second hand,— there is an immense fund of possible mechanical power still coming to us from him which might be economically utilized. Leaving out of sight all our more important relations to him (for, as has been already said, he is in a physical sense our creator, and he keeps us alive from hour to hour), and considering him only as a possible servant to grind our corn and spin our flax, we find that even in this light there are startling possibilities of profit in the study of our subject. From recent measures it appears that from every square yard of the earth exposed perpendicularly to the sun's rays, in the absence of an absorbing atmosphere there could be derived more than one horse-power, if the heat were all converted into this use, and that even on such a little area as the island of Manhattan, or that occupied by the city of London, the noontide heat is enough, could it all be utilized, to drive all the steam-engines in the world. It will not be surprising, then, to hear that many practical men are turning their attention to this as a source of power, and that, though it has hitherto cost more to utilize the power than it is worth, there is reason to believe that some of the greatest changes which civilization has to bring may yet be due to such investigations. 

The visitor to the last Paris Exposition may remember an extraordinary machine on the grounds of the Trocadero looking like a gigantic inverted umbrella pointed sunward. This was the sun-machine of M. Mouchot, consisting of a great parabolic reflector which concentrated the heat on a boiler in the focus and drove a steam-engine with it, which was employed in turn to work a printing-press as our engraving shows (Fig. II). Because these constructions have been hitherto little more than playthings, we are not to think of them as useless. If toys, they are the toys of the childhood of a science which is destined to grow, and in its maturity to apply this solar energy to the use of all mankind.   

 

Even now they are beginning to pass into the region of practical utility, and in the form of the latest achievement of Mr. Ericsson's ever-young genius are ready for actual work on an economical scale. We present in Fig. 12 his new actually working solar engine, which there is every reason to believe is more efficient than Mouchot's, and probably capable of being used with economical advantage in pumping water in desert regions of our own country. It is pregnant with suggestion of the future, if we consider the growing demand for power in the world, and the fact that its stock of coal, though vast, is strictly limited, in the sense that when it is gone we can get absolutely no more. The sun has been making a little every day for millions of years—so little and for so long that it is as though time had daily dropped a single penny into the bank to our credit for untold ages, until an enormous fund had been thus slowly accumulated in our favor. We are drawing on this fund like a prodigal who thinks his means endless, but the day will come when our check will no longer be honored, and what shall we do then?

 

The exhaustion of some of the coal-beds is an affair of the immediate future, by comparison with the vast period of time we have been speaking of. The English coal-beds, it is asserted, will, from present indications, be quite used up in about three hundred years more. Three hundred years ago the sun, looking down on the England of our forefathers, saw a fair land of green woods and quiet waters, a land unvexed with noisier machinery than the spinning-wheel, or the needles of the " free maids that weave their threads with bones." Because of the coal which has been dug from its soil, he sees it now soot-blackened, furrowed with railway-cuttings, covered with noisy manufactories, filled with grimy operatives, while the island shakes with the throb of coal-driven engines, and its once quiet waters are churned by the wheels of steamships. Many generations of the lives of men have passed to make the England of Elizabeth into the England of Victoria, but what a moment this time is compared with the vast lapse of ages during which the coal was being stored! What a moment in the life of the " all-beholding sun," who in a few hundred years—his gift exhausted and the last furnace-fire out—may send his beams through rents in the ivy-grown walls of deserted factories, upon silent engines brown with eating rust, while the mill-hand has gone to other lands, the rivers are clean again, the harbors show only white sails, and England's " black country " is green once more! To America, too, such a time, may come, though at a greatly longer distance.

Does this all seem but the idlest fancy? That something like it will come to pass sooner or later is a most certain fact—as certain as any process of. nature—if we do not find a new source of power; for of the coal which has supplied us, after a certain time we can get no more.

Future ages may see the seat of empire transferred to regions of the earth now barren and desolated under intense solar heat—countries which, for that very cause, will not improbably become the seat of mechanical and thence of political power. Whoever finds the way to make industrially useful the vast sun-power now wasted on the deserts of North Africa or the shores of the Red Sea, will effect a greater change in men's affairs than any conqueror in history has done; for he will once more people those waste places with the life that swarmed there in the best days of Carthage and of old Egypt, but under another civilization, where man no longer shall worship the sun as a god, but shall have learned to make it his servant.

 

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