POWER FROM THE SUN

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXVII, Issue 12486, 21 October 1938, Page 7 (Supplement)

POWER FROM THE SUN

THE PROBLEM THAT IS BAFFLING MEN

Gifts of £130,000 have been given Avithin a year to tAvo Universities for trying to find out lioav poAver can be got from the sun. This dream, of converting the almost unimaginable loss of solar energy into useful Avork on the earth has attracted scientists, charlatans, and inventors for a century. Men have tried to imprison sunlight in a box again and again, not realising that heat is merely a wave-motion in what Ave call the ether not a tangible thing that can be bottled up or dealt with piecemeal. But these unusual, gifts have set many men thinking anew, and are a reminder of the wonderful sun engines designed by Mr. Shuman and others, and of the enterprising experiments of men like Mr. Claude, inventor of the neon lamp, who tried to sink a pipe two miles down into the sea to make use of the difference in temperature of the Avater low down and that Avarmed by the sun’s rays at the surface.

What Sunshine Gives

There have been many romantic descriptions .of the billions of horsepower wasted in the sun’s energy, of the trillions of tons of coal that would have to be burned to equal a day’s heat given off by it, but perhaps the most sensible is that of Dr Compton, President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the other day, when acknowledging the new gift -for this research. In three months of greatest sunshine, he said, an acre of land receives directly from the sun an amount of heat equivalent to that which would be produced by burning about 250 tons of coal. Here, then, is the real problem for the engineer or the chemist. Any sun engine that is devised must not be more costly to run and maintain than this. The property of one kind of phdto-cell to give off energy when light falls on it has naturally led many inventors to think of it as a promising solution, but no form of cell yet exists which holds any real promise of practical results. A great part of this new gift of money must be devoted to finding out winch (if any) of the sun engines and solar energy devices have any real promise of competing with coal and the motor engine in actual cost. Sunlight power is being used and converted into energy on an infinite scale all the time by our crops and vegetation, but to trap sunlight and use its power directly is a problem almost as elusive as the getting of gold from sea water.