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Home Made Solar Panels

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The History Behind Home Made Solar Panels

If you decide to add home made solar panels to your home, you may assume that you`re doing something that`s completely new and innovative. While ancient peoples didn`t use solar panels atop their primitive homes, the history of humans using the sun`s energy to benefit their lives is quite long.

The ancient Greeks and Romans would scratch their heads if you tried to start up a conversation about photovoltaics—the conversion of solar energy into electrical energy. However, they were pretty innovative in using sunlight to meet their day-to-day energy needs. For instance, they designed their architecture so it efficiently allowed sunlight to heat and light their homes. For instance, the Romans would use glass or mica (a hard heat-resistant mineral found in rocks) to cover openings in their home that faced the sun. This would allow their homes to retain the sun`s heat during the wintertime. In a certain sense, these were home made solar panels that effectively captured and used the Earth`s sunlight.

I once read a poster that read: “What is popular is not always right.” Although it`s debatable whether it`s “right” to continue meeting 95% of the Earth`s energy needs through fossil fuels, it`s obvious that the Earth can`t sustain that figure. Have you heard of Auguste Mouchout? The Frenchman created the first machine that directly transformed sun energy into mechanical power.

Mouchout was skeptical that the Earth`s supply of fossil fuels would never run out. Interestingly, that was the conventional wisdom during the Industrial Revolution.

It`s likely that Mouchout would consider building home made solar panels if he were alive today. He was absolutely, positive certain that humans could eventually consume all of the Earth`s coal. So he built a steam engine that received 100% of its power from the sun. Though Mouchout`s invention never caught on, he represented an array of European scientists who studied solar energy in the 1800s. Meanwhile, in the United States, a man named John Ericsson created a solar power contraption called the “parabolic trough collector.”

In fact, most vehicles were actually electric models by 1900s. Such cars were able to travel great distances, thanks to innovations such as Thomas Edison`s electric current, termed “Direct Current (DC).” And while Henry Ford himself was skeptical about the use of fossil fuels to power vehicles, the Ford Motor Company was actually a subsidiary of J.D. Rockefeller`s Standard Oil Company. Yes, the rest “is history.”

Meanwhile, the first half of the 1900s brought few developments that would contribute to the development of today`s home made solar panels. However, this wasn`t to say that society wasn`t intrigued in a society that was powered by the sun`s energy, rather than by fossil fuels. For instance, Albert Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize (physics) for his study of the photoelectric effect. This process is key in using solar cells to create electricity.

While the use of home made solar panels is fairly new, it`s been a work in progress for thousands of years. And it all started with those ancient glass and mineral coverings.

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