If the first solar entrepreneur hadn't been kidnapped? | Hacker News Reader

If the first solar entrepreneur hadn't been kidnapped?

techxplore.com

37 pointsBrajeshwar12 comments

> Solar is inherently democratic (everybody has access to the sun)

Not really, it's tied to how much land you own. Which would exacerbate current housing imbalance issues.

And "where" that land is. But I do accept the argument that solar is more egalitarian than fossil fuels.

How much sunlight you have access to, which makes it mostly a bit better than land ownership — the local discount supermarkets here in Berlin sell PV units aimed at people renting apartments.

But yes, more one-dollar-one-vote than one-person-one-vote.

Also solar costs a lot of money up front so it favors the wealthy and excludes the poor (short of subsidy programs or other schemes). Things that favor people with money are not democratic.

> given two days' sun… [the device] will store sufficient electrical energy to light an ordinary house for a week.

Obviously this was for 1909's power consumption. But imagine having the constraint of "The average household has x square feet of solar generation capabilities" when creating an electrical appliance.

The manufacturers of the appliances would've had to care a lot more about energy efficiency, bragging about it as a feature of the newest model, instead of taking for granted that electricity would be cheap and plentiful...

Did anybody ever reproduce his findings? I recently tried to make a SnZb cell based on the patent, but it didn't work. :(

That's very cool! Can you say more about it or is there a project web site? Trying to replicate inventions from the patent filings must be incredibly difficult. They are primarily legal documents and not technical documents, unfortunately. I feel like you shouldn't be able to get a patent unless you submit full building plans. I don't think software patents are a good idea but if you had to open source the code in exchange for a license, that also seems like an acceptable tradeoff.

I mostly based my experiment on this website [1]. There's no documentation about it yet, bust basically I alloyed zinc and antimony in a crucible at 700°C and splat-cooled it (pour onto a steel surface and squish the cooling metal with a copper block). The resulting disk is quite brittle. I mounted it in a improvised clamp, between a copper and german silver electrode. No diode behaviour could be measured.

I think my backyard metallurgy is not very precise though. Also, my current way of holding the sample might be all kinds of bad. So some more messing around is needed

[1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/10/how-to-build-a-low...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cove

> Cove accused a former investor, Frederick W. Huestis of organizing the kidnapping. After the kidnapping, the business shuttered

I do like the WhatIf? angle of the article, though it would have been nice to see a graph with actual solar trends vs the author's whatif trend. Still, placing the nexus point of Solar/Oil 20 years earlier doesn't seem that impressive, given the 40 year headstart.

Link to the thought experiment:

https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2023-10...

We in exUSSR once seen huge number of such cases, of "genius entrepreneurs-inventors" kidnapped by some bad persons.

But when I myself learn documents and talked to witnesses (or with these inventors), in nearly all cases I seen crazy person, who cannot deal with real life tasks and trying to play role of "genius inventor", and gather money from around (read about 4D investors in toilet paper entrepreneur), and cannot make any stable economy.

And when I analyze their works (sure many prefer to make all their crazy things top secret, but sometimes leak few things), I have seen all sorts of perpetuum mobile, faked science documents, demonstrative decline of strict accounting (to make robbery more easy), dramatic crazy stories.

Interesting article. Probably better to link directly to where it was originally published, because there are pictures: https://theconversation.com/if-the-first-solar-entrepreneur-...

What if the whole business was just a scam and this was his way of winding it down?

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