During World War II, American pilots and sailors shot down or torpedoed in the Pacific often became stranded on life rafts and died of dehydration before they could be rescued.
The biophysicist Mária Telkes was recruited at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to find a way to prevent dehydration and thus save the lives of conscripts.
The Hungarian-American scientist did this by inventing an emergency balloon-like desalination device which used the sun’s heat to evaporate seawater and condense it into clean drinking water.
After the war, she developed more ideas about thermal solar heat and in 1948 pioneered the world’s first completely solar-heated house: Dover Sun House in Massachusetts.
The house used imposing 10-foot (3-meter) high windows to collect the sun’s rays and melt a salt (sodium sulfate), which stored the sun’s heat.
As the salt cooled and solidified again, the heat was released and used to heat air circulating through the two-bedroom house for about 10 days or more of cold weather.
Among other inventions, in 1953 she also developed an easy-to-use solar oven for cooking food in remote areasable to reach 200C.
Telkes (1900-1995) became known as the “solar queen” and registered more than 20 patents, mostly based on solar power, over her working life.
