Pioneering Hungarian-American physicist Maria Telkes, an early champion of the probabilities of photo voltaic vitality, is being remembered on the 122nd anniversary of her delivery and the seventieth anniversary of her successful the inaugural Society of Girls Engineers Achievement Award on 12 December 1952.
Dr Telkes was born in Budapest, Hungary, on this date in 1900 and studied bodily chemistry on the metropolis’s Eotvos Lorand College from 1920, incomes his doctorate in 1924.
After commencement, he immigrated to the US the place he had a relative based mostly on the Hungarian consul in Cleveland, Ohio, and took on a sequence of analysis roles, initially working as a biophysicist investigating the mind waves on the Cleveland Clinic Basis – the place he co-authored. the ebook Phenomenon of Life along with his instructor, George Washington Crile – after which for Westinghouse finding out the conversion of warmth to electrical energy.
Granted American citizenship in 1937, he took a job on the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise (MIT) finding out photo voltaic vitality in 1939.
After the US entered World Conflict II after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, Washington appointed Telkes as a civilian adviser to the Workplace of Scientific Analysis and Improvement, wherein function he developed a solar-powered desalination machine, designed to offer each troopers and civilians with utility. clear ingesting water distilled from seawater in harsh and arid environments, particularly within the Pacific.
After the conflict, Dr Telkes turned his consideration to the event of solar-powered homes, realizing that thermal vitality storage was an pressing downside and believing that molten salts may present an answer.
Nonetheless, when a design centered on salt (sodium sulphate) by Glauber failed, Dr Telkes was blamed by Hoyt C Hottel, chairman of MIT’s photo voltaic vitality fund, and faraway from the undertaking.
Persevering with independently, he labored on the Dover Solar Home with architect Elearnor Raymond and philanthropist Amelia Peabody, a brand new solar-powered home mannequin that melted Glauber’s salt behind glass by heating the air surrounding it, a course of trapped in warmth. and releases it because it cools in order that it’s evenly distributed by the hidden electrical followers.
Initially profitable and attracting reward from Widespread Science journal and a visiting public, the undertaking later bumped into issues and a foul report on the operating of MIT’s photo voltaic division noticed Dr Telkes fired from the establishment in 1953.
Maria Telkes remembers Google’s newest Doodle
(Google)
Undeterred, he transferred to New York College’s Faculty of Engineering and developed a solar-powered oven to be used in distant places with the help of a Ford Basis grant.
After a number of years working in trade within the Nineteen Sixties for the Curtiss-Wright Firm, Cryo-Therm and Melpar, Dr. Telkes returned to academia and the event of home solar energy, first on the College of Delaware’s Institute of Power Conversion on the finish of decade, the place he labored on photovoltaic cells, and later labored for the US Division of Power.
Talking on the first Worldwide Convention of Girls Engineers and Scientists in New York in 1964, Maria Telkes instructed her viewers: “Issues which might be considered unimaginable curiosity me. I love to do issues they are saying cannot be carried out.”
A real visionary with greater than 20 patents to his identify, he died in his native Budapest on 2 December 1995, 10 days shy of his ninety fifth birthday.
He was featured in Google Doodle on 12 December 2022.
