Most people think that the use of the sun’s power goes back to only the collection panels we use today to charge our battery operated systems. Solar power history goes back to 400 BC.
Ancient civilizations used the sun to heat their dwellings and grow their plants, as Native Americans, Greeks, and Romans went about their daily lives. Romans thought of the idea involving the capturing of sun through glass to make more pronounced use of it.
The Romans took it a step further than heating for their homes and made crude greenhouses in which to collect the sun to grow plants and vegetables more quickly. It extended their growing season and gave them larger crops.
The Native Americans and Greeks used the sun to heat their homes first. Their homes were built along the hillsides and used earth contact to maintain the heat. The homes were faced into the sun to collect the heat, then the warm air would leave the home and a new warmth would enter the dwelling in the new day.
Although Greece and America are thousands of miles and oceans away from each other, the sun’s power was such an obvious resource to them that they both recognized it in the period when they both began to build communities.
That was the extent of the use of the sun for several hundred more years. In the late 1700′s a man named Horace de Saussare designed a device that collects sunlight. The collector cone gathered the sun to boil ammonia. The result was refrigerant. Scientists were enthralled with this new idea all the way throughout the 1800′s.
The steam engine was the next major development in solar power history. The engine that was invented used expensive and difficult equipment, so it did not last long. Scientists continued to search and came up with a cell for collection that is similar to what we use today. That was in the late 19th century.
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