Maria Telkes, “Queen of the Sun” scientist who designed the first house with solar heat and other technological marvels

They call her the Queen of the Sun, and rightly so.

Biophysicist Maria Telkes distinguished herself by creating devices that used solar energy, when it was not so common.

One of her most famous designs was the Sun Dover House, a house built 75 years ago in rural Massachusetts, United States, with a solar heating system she designed.

But it was one of his creations, including a life-saving device during World War II.

When it broke out, Talkes was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, where the U.S. had been in 1941 to help the war effort. Office of Scientific Research and Development was created.

You were tasked with coming up with a solution to an immediate problem.: When airmen or sailors were shot down in the Pacific, they languished in the ocean and died of dehydration.

Telkes designed a solar-powered inflatable desalination kit, which converted brackish water into potable water.

The device was incorporated into the US Army’s emergency medical kits.

The same technology was later expanded and redesigned to meet the water needs of the Virgin Islands, and to give you an idea of ​​how extraordinary the inventor was a woman, this was announced in the Daily Boston Globe in November 1948. :

“Thanks to a tall, stunning-looking blonde from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who, if not an established physicist, has enough to make a living as a model or showgirl.The people of St. John in the Virgin Islands no longer have to rely on storms for drinking water“.

It is not the only publication to highlight her gender with a surprise when reporting her achievements.

When MIT held a symposium called “Solar Space Heating” in 1950, Telkes and architect Eleanor Raymond discussed the design and construction of the Sun Dover House.

“The house of tomorrow is on its way. In fact, one has already been built… and another, much less expensive, It was conceived by a woman scientist and an architect of the same sex“said one of many publications talking about the issue in the US and other countries.

To be more specific, there were not two but three It was women who joined in to make the project of building a fully solar-heated house a reality… at a time when women were expected to clean the house, not build it.

Raymond She pursued a career in a field where women were rare: in 1910, there were only 50 female architects in the entire United States, and many architecture schools refused admission to women.

Born in 1887, she graduated in 1917 and, after partnering with an architect to be able to work, became independent in 1928.

Five years later, a commission to design a Bauhaus-style studio in Dover, Massachusetts proved momentous.

was for Sculptor and philanthropist Amelia Peabodywho would become her patron and complete the trio of women collaborating at Sun Dover House, providing financing.

Heir to a top American family fortune, Peabody’s birth was destined for life Socialist from Boston, but chose to remain single, pursuing his passion for sculpture, and using the family fortune to fund charitable causes.

On horseback, he fell in love with Dover and bought an acre-woodland property where he retreated from the hustle and bustle of social life.

It was there that Raymond built his sculpture studio and 7 other structures, many of which were architecturally revolutionary.

And it was Raymond who proposed sponsoring a historical project by a scientist named Maria Telkes, an idea that appealed to Peabody..

MIT, where that scientist developed the project, had no problem with Peabody being involved, but questioned the association with Raymond, because not only was he gay but he didn’t go to great lengths to hide it.

MIT’s top Solar administrator wrote that his affiliation left him “somewhat concerned” for the school’s well-being.

However, in 1948, on land on the Peabody Estate in Dover, and with about US$20,000 (about US$255,000 today), Raymond’s plans and Talcase’s novel heating system design were transformed into the Sun Dover House.

It was the first house to be heated by solar energy..

Although MIT demonstrated another project at the conference, which used the sun to heat water circulating in pipes, it relied on auxiliary heating on cloudy days.

Avoided that need by using Telkes Mirabilis salt or miracle salt, also called Glauber’s salt, the sodium salt of sulfuric acid.

It is a solid that contains water and stores heat with seven times greater efficiency than water.

The house itself functioned as an oven, with 18 glass and metal windows absorbing the heat of the sun, which trapped the air in the walls into a container containing 21 tons of salt.

Heat was stored and used when needed.

On Christmas Eve 1948, the family of Esther, Anthony, and their 3-year-old son Andrew Nemethy. He moved into the experiment that would be his new home.

They were refugees who fled Hungary at the end of World War II and accepted an offer from Anthony’s second cousin Telkes to become tenants of Sun Dover House.

They lived there initially rent-free.

But with one condition: they have to open the doors to people who want to see their future home … And many wanted to

“Thousands of people came to visit us,” Andrew Nemethy, now a writer and teacher, told BBC Witness.

“Reporters, curious people, men and women dressed in their Sunday best, toasted the house. It was a very social occasion, and my father, who was a very fine intellectual and understood how the Sun Dover house worked, gave tours, while my mother. laughed.”

Peabody and Raymond became family friends, and the architect once said that when they opened the door to the house “and I was greeted by a blast of warm air that I knew could only come from the sun, it was truly thrilling.”

But the project had the most visible face Telkes, the biggest source of attraction for the press.

“She was an extremely attractive and charismatic woman who was hard to pigeonhole,” recalls Nemethy.

“At that time, the Hungarian movie star Zsa Zsa Gabor was very famous, and those who wrote about Talkes were those who followed social circles in the arts in Massachusetts, so they described her appearance, her gestures, and the way she spoke. As if she Any foreigner.

“But she was also incredibly focused and a brilliant scientist, and it was hard to understand. The coverage was almost laughable.”

Telkes fell in love with the sun While she studied at the University of Budapest, where she earned a doctorate in physical chemistry in 1924, it was a rare achievement because only a small percentage of university students were women.

A year later, he went to visit an uncle in the US and stayed.

She worked as a biophysicist at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and as a research engineer at Westinghouse Electric before joining the Solar Energy Conversion Project, a unit of MIT, in 1939.

That caused suspicionNot just because she was the only woman, but because of her insistence on creating things that were used in the real world and her ability to promote them.

“In teaching, you didn’t go out and sell yourself like she did,” notes Nemethy.

“She was like a media personality, and it wasn’t the way things were done in the ivory tower”.

Thus, like praise “World’s Leading Authority on Solar Heating Science”From the newspaper The Boston PostContrasted with a 1953 MIT report on the solar program, which called Talkes “a man of strong opinions, who emphatically expressed, Does not voluntarily submit notifications“

But despite its public success, behind the scenes, the solar home experiment was not going so well.

During the third winter, the heating system stops working properly.

Telkes warned of this at the 1950 MIT conference.

“The problem of a house heated by the sun cannot be solved by one or two experimental houses, but Every new home is another experimental step Towards using the sun as a fuel source,” he said.

Telkes continued to research solar energy throughout his life.

and invented such devices Solar ovenDesigned for use in developing countries, it was capable of reaching temperatures of 400 °C, required no special materials to construct, and cost only US$4.

or as Solar air heaterwhich regulates the temperature in all seasons, which absorbs or reflects the sun’s heat depending on the weather.

He also worked to develop materials capable of withstanding the extreme temperatures of space.

In 1980 he assisted the US Department of Energy in the development of the world’s first solar electric residence, built in Carlisle, Massachusetts.

By the time of her death in 1995, she had held more than 20 patents, most of them for inventions in which she exploited the unlimited potential of solar energy.

“In any case, sunlight will sooner or later be used as a source of energy,” he wrote in a 1951 article, adding: “Why wait?”.

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