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"It wasn't until I was past forty that it bacame clear that I was going to be quote, successful, unquote."
- Isaac Asimov
 |
| Solar Reception Screen | ||
| A device for converting sunlight to electricity |
I don't know what kind of experimentation was going on fifteen years earlier than the date mentioned. I'm also curious when the idea of a set of receptors in a 'panel' format.
| The city of San Francisco replaced its antiquated cable cars with moving stairways, powered with the Douglas-Martin Solar Reception Screens. |
| Technovelgy from The Roads Must Roll,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1940 Additional resources -
|
Henri Becquerel discovered the photovoltaic effect in the late nineteenth century, which allowed the production of electricity directly from the sun. Photovoltaic power was never used commercially for many years, since it was very inefficient at turning sunlight into electricity.
See also the entry on sunpower screen, from Heinlein's story Coventry, also published in 1940.
The first commercial solar panel was made in 1954.
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'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
