| Photovoltaic Power History Returns Back To Ancient Civilizations |
| Written by Jim Gallow | |
| Saturday, 24 July 2010 | |
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Solar power history is not the recent history that most people think it is. Use of collection panels and battery charging systems may be recent, but use of the sun's power goes back to ancient civilization.
Solar power history is not the recent history that most people think it is. Use of collection panels and battery charging systems may be recent, but use of the sun's power goes back to ancient civilization. Ancient civilizations used the sun to heat their dwellings and grow their plants, as Native Americans, Greeks, and Romans went about their daily lives. Romans thought of the idea involving the capturing of sun through glass to make more pronounced use of it. The Romans took it a step further than heating for their homes and made crude greenhouses in which to collect the sun to grow plants and vegetables more quickly. It extended their growing season and gave them larger crops. Native Americans were using solar power from around the year 400 BC. They built homes into the sides of mountains and hills so that they could capture the sun in the daytime. Then the heat would escape in the night and be collected once again in the daytime. Though the Greeks and the Native Americans had no contact with each other they still both managed to discover the sun as a source of free and natural heat. It was such an obvious resource that it could not be overlooked by any intelligent society. That was the extent of the use of the sun for several hundred more years. In the late 1700's a man named Horace de Saussare designed a device that collects sunlight. The collector cone gathered the sun to boil ammonia. The result was refrigerant. Scientists were enthralled with this new idea all the way throughout the 1800's. Steam engines were developed next, but were not particularly efficient. They were expensive to run and difficult to keep running once they were started. There was still great potential in the sun's power, though, so experimentation continued and a solar cell was invented in the 1800's, beginning the practical solar power history. The Article Author: Generate FREE electricity! Read all about the overunity motor and my Magniwork review by visiting my website. |
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