The Sun Queen

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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The choking off of oil supplies because of the war with Iran might make some of us wish that in the last couple of decades we had explored solar power more aggressively. Maybe the story of Maria Telkes will be of some inspiration.

Who was she? During World War II, she invented a device that used only sunlight to turn ocean water into drinking water. And it fit snugly in a life raft. True, most people have never heard of her. But military pilots and sailors stranded in the Pacific certainly knew her name—because her invention kept them alive.

Born in Hungary in 1900, Mária earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Budapest in 1924. A year later, she immigrated to the United States with her scientific training, her ambition, and an idea that seemed almost like magic: What if we could harness the sun’s energy to solve practical problems? She could not resist doing some research.

Becoming an American citizen in 1937 marked a pivotal moment in Telkes’s life. That same year, she transitioned to a research engineer role at Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh. She initially focused on developing metal alloys for thermocouples to convert heat into electricity. Her venture into solar energy research began in 1939. As part of the Solar Energy Conversion Project at MIT, she investigated thermoelectric devices powered by sunlight. She was at MIT for 13 years and then at New York University for five years.

When World War II broke out, the U.S. military faced a deadly challenge. Many downed pilots and shipwrecked sailors stranded at sea, surrounded by water they could not drink, often died not from injuries but from dehydration. By then, however, Maria had developed the Telkes solar still. It was a portable, inflatable device made of clear plastic that could be packed into life rafts and emergency kits. Using nothing but sunlight, it evaporated seawater, then condensed the pure water vapor, leaving the salt behind. The device could produce about one quart of fresh drinking water per day. That doesn’t sound like much, until you realize that one quart per day can be the difference between life and death for someone floating in the Pacific Ocean.

The U.S. military added the Telkes solar stills to life rafts throughout the Navy and Air Force. They remained standard emergency equipment into the 1960s. No one knows exactly how many lives the device saved, but “countless” isn’t an exaggeration. Every pilot, every sailor who survived long enough to be rescued because they had fresh water owed their survival, in part, to Mária Telkes. Her colleagues started calling her the “Sun Queen.” But she wasn’t done.

After the war, while most solar research was still considered fringe science, Mária was already building the future. In 1948, working with architect Eleanor Raymond and funded by philanthropist Amelia Peabody, she designed and built the Dover Sun House in Massachusetts. It was the first residential building in the world heated entirely by solar power.

The system was ingenious yet simple: solar collectors on the south-facing roof captured the sun’s heat during the day. But the revolutionary part was Mária developed a chemical storage system using Glauber’s salt (sodium sulfate) that could store that heat and release it slowly at night and on cloudy days. In 1948, when most homes were heated by coal or oil, when “solar power” sounded like science fiction, Mária Telkes built a house that stayed warm using only the sun. No furnace. No fossil fuels. Just chemistry and sunlight.

The Dover Sun House worked successfully for three winters before technical issues emerged, such as the salt eventually degraded and heating became uneven. But the concept was proven. It was possible. She had shown the world that solar heating wasn’t a dream—it was engineering.

Mária Telkes continued her work for decades. She held over 20 patents. She developed thermoelectric devices for NASA. She pioneered phase-change materials for thermal energy storage—the same basic concepts used in modern solar thermal systems. In 1977, the American Solar Energy Society gave her their Lifetime Achievement Award. She was 77 years old and still working, still innovating, still pushing the boundaries of what solar energy could do.

Mária Telkes died in 1995 just 10 days shy of her 95^th birthday. By then, solar panels were becoming common, residential solar heating was an established technology, and the renewable energy revolution she’d helped pioneer was finally gaining momentum. Nowadays, when you see solar panels on a roof, when you hear about thermal energy storage, when you read about concentrated solar power plants, you’re seeing the legacy of the “Sun Queen.” She proved that Hungarian immigrant with a chemistry degree could change the world.

During WW II, when pilots were being shot down over the Pacific, Mária Telkes gave them a chance to survive until rescue arrived. And she did it with nothing but plastic, sunlight, and brilliant engineering.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one with Bob Drury, The First to Go West, has just been published in paperback. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.