WORLD ACHIEVEMENT

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIX, Issue 253, 25 September 1939, Page 2

WORLD ACHIEVEMENT

HARNESSING THE SUN. Has it ever occurred to you that in a world where oil and iietrol may one day give out, and where coal must surely be used up before many more centuries go ,by, one might expect that men would try to harness- the heat of the sun in order to secure the energy they need? As a matter of fact, this has been attempted more than once. That there is power to spare if only we knew how to gather it up goes without-saying. The sun is over 100 times bigger in diameter than the earth, and its volume is over a million times bigger. Every square foot of its immense surface emits more than ten horse-power of energy, and whenever sunlight falls upon the earth there is one-tenth of a horse-power of energy in the space of a square foot, or, say, 4000 horse-power in an acre. AVill some genius please set to - work to gather up all this waste energy? Suppose that in the regions of the earth where sunshine is usually the order of the day, the energy of a square mile of sunshine could be concentrated into power, think what immense energy would be available at no charge whatever? But great areas of mirrors ' arc required to concentrate the sunshine sufficiently to raise water to boiling point, and even then the water must be in a very .thin metal, boiler, which means that no high steam-pressure can be generated; so that, although man has so far succeeded in harnessing the sun, he has not been eminently successful, and there is still a chance for some enterprising inventive genius to come along and give us radiant energy. —(h).