Today in history, December 24: A world-first in solar heating
The Dover Sun House on the March 1949 cover of Popular Science magazine. (Supplied: Popular Science)
On December 24, 1948, a family of Hungarian refugees moved into a small house in Dover, Massachusetts.
Having fled war and communism, the Nemethy family were relieved when the house was lent to them rent-free. But there was a catch.
The Nemethy family had moved into what's widely regarded as one of the earliest, if not the first, solar-heated homes.
Popular Science magazine once called the Dover Sun House, as it was nicknamed, more important than the advent of atomic energy.
Yet, the house no longer exists.
Maria Telkes (left) and architect Eleanor Raymond in front of the Dover Sun House. (Supplied: Frances Loeb Library Harvard University)
A women's place
Constructed in 1948, Dover Sun House was born out of MIT's solar energy research project.
The house was important, Popular Science argued because "we have reached a point where we need so much energy that we can see the eventual end of our supply of coal and oil".
Yet, perhaps more radical at the time than a bold experiment in harnessing the sun's power to warm a house in a cold climate, Dover Sun House was created by three women.
Inventor and biophysicist Maria Telkes (a second cousin of the Nemethys) developed the solar heating system for the house designed by architect Eleanor Raymond on land provided by philanthropist Amelia Peabody, who also funded the project.
"Sunlight will be used as a source of energy sooner or later anyway. Why wait?" Telkes said at the time.
Dover Sun House was a sensation.
Headlines like "Sun Furnace in Your Attic" and "She Trapped the Sun" heralded a new energy future. Andrew Nemethy said thousands of people toured the house on weekly tours in the first year or so.
"We were both human guinea pigs and fishbowl attractions," he wrote in the Boston Globe.
But the excitement was premature.
Maria Tlekes is regarded as a solar energy pioneer. (Supplied: Library of Congress)
Hiding heaters in the closet
Dover Sun House consisted of a residence on the ground floor, while upstairs large glass windows captured sunlight and warmed air, which was circulated by fans into tanks filled with Glauber's salt.
MIT sums up the technology like this: "As the warm air circulated around the drums, the salt in each was melted, enabling it to store heat at constant temperature. When the temperature of the surrounding air dropped, the chemical recrystallised and released the absorbed heat."
Nemethy says the system was unreliable: "Telkes's vision quickly ran into the cold, cloudy realities of the New England winter. After week-long strings of cloudy days, indoor temperatures sank to panic levels. My mother complained, and we soon had electric heaters in all the rooms. (On tour days, we hid them in the closets.)"
The solar heating and the public tours were abandoned a few years later because the Glauber's Salt corroded their containers until they leaked. In 1954, a conventional oil heater was installed in the house.
The Dover Sun House was eventually demolished. Yet, Telkes's legacy as a pioneer of solar energy lives on today.