Solar home heating research descended from decades of solar water heaters

Evidence

The effort to develop solar heating systems built on almost a half century of work on solar water heaters. In the 1890s, a Maryland inventor patented the first solar water heater, and the invention soon found a market in sunnier climates. In California in the first decades of the century, and then in Florida in the 1920s and 1930s, a number of companies installed thousands of solar water heaters in homes and apartments. In 1936, a Boston philanthropist took the next step, endowing a major research program in solar energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By 1939, the MIT researchers had designed and built a solar-heated house with the water heater as a model. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 221

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Renewable energy advances exceeded expert expectations and fringe status — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2671

Broader Connections

• Renewable energy advances exceeded expert expectations and fringe status #expands (0.72) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2671