In the cross hairs of global events - Ma'adi's solar engine

It didn't seem the right timing to post this earlier, because the revolution and my own evacuation were still unfolding. It seemed more pressing to put my immediate thoughts to words, and recall my experiences. I was thinking about it today, though, and this article perhaps should have been among my first posts. It's my Maadi Messenger article from the February issue. Unfortunately, I have yet to see the hard copy, but the theme that month was 'desert.' I wrote about the solar-powered engine that was built in Ma'adi in 1911.

The article is below. What I don't fully elaborate on there, however, is the extent of the First World War's impact on Shuman's invention. His work was backed by both British and German financiers -- a relationship that became untenable in 1914. Then Shuman himself died in 1918. Even if he had managed to coral new support, he was no longer around to carry out his vision for harnessing the Sahara's solar power.

What strikes me about it now is how accidental it all seems. Here is a man working successfully to find a sustainable energy source, yet as his work progresses he runs headlong into "the war to end all wars." The conflict was so devastating, his project was left almost wholly forgotten. Shuman's work somehow appears less relevant after the war. Why is that?

As we continue to hear about this new era in the Middle East, most of those affected were caught by surprise. For me there is an accidental feeling -- How did I get here? What is going on? You think you are living one story, and come to find out things are very different from what you previously supposed. I think the same was true for Shuman -- at once he is an up-and-coming inventor, and then because of a variety of circumstantial factors that were completely out of control, that part of his story just ends. With that, here is the Maadi Messenger story from February:

"Harvesting the Sun: Maadi’s early-twentieth century solar engine"

Much of Maadi’s history has been about expansion into areas that were otherwise desert. Throughout the twentieth, and now twenty-first centuries, Maadi participated in greater Cairo’s outward spread, as the city gradually swallowed up its surroundings with people, roads, buildings, and lights.

In Maadi’s early years, however, before the automobile dominated Cairo’s traffic, and when coal still burned within most engines, Maadi’s desert surroundings provided the opportunity to capitalize on a largely untapped energy source -- the sun. By 1911, Maadi was home to one of the world’s first industrial-sized, solar-powered steam engines. The machine pumped Nile water into the land south of Maadi, so that it might sustainably convert the desert into agricultural land.

Understanding how this story began requires a trans-Atlantic trip to Tacony, a neighborhood south of downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There, on the corner lot of an average-looking residential street, stood a large, three-story, red-brick house. Enclosed under its gray roof was the home and workshop of American scientist and inventor Frank Shuman (1862-1918).

Shuman began work on a solar-powered engine in his Tacony workshop in 1897, hoping his invention would curb coal consumption. He started with a series of ether-filled pipes, ether having a relatively low boiling point. The pipes were strung through a series of water-filled boxes, which were then heated by mirrors, angled to reflect the sun. The construction generated steam, which then powered a water pump in Shuman’s backyard. In favorable weather, the pump could lift 3,000 gallons per minute to the height of 33 feet. To prove the pump’s durability, Shuman left it running continuously throughout the winter and spring. Even on cold days, so long as there was sun, the pump worked.

After this initial success, Shuman founded the Sun Power Company in 1908 and began plans for expansion into warmer climates. Three years later construction began in Maadi. This time, rather than putting ether in the pipes, Shuman used water. No longer constrained to the dimensions of his backyard, this new engine was significantly bigger, so that the total heat-catching area was more than 10,000 square feet. It was capable of pumping 6,000 gallons per minute.

Popular Science reported at the time that Shuman had “suddenly amazed the world by constructing a sun-power plant which promises to turn the deserts of the tropics into centres of industrial activity.” The magazine projected that the area 20 degrees to the North and South of the equator would be ideal for the engine’s use.

When the engine was formally unveiled on a sunny June day in 1913, Lord Kitchener, the consul-general and head of the Egyptian government, attended. Kitchener was hoping to expand cotton cultivation in Egypt and the Sudan. While coal-powered irrigation pumps seemed the only way to increase agriculture in areas remote from the Nile, upon seeing Shuman’s engine, Kitchener ordered the construction of a similar apparatus in Khartoum.

Another British observer, J. Astley Cooper reported back to the Foreign Office in England, suggesting that the solar engine be employed throughout Africa and India. “How valuable this invention will be, in the Tropical parts of the Empire where irrigation is required, and fuel rare, I need not point out,” he wrote.

While it appeared that Shuman’s success was imminent, solar energy was not without its competitors. In 1908 -- the same year Shuman founded the Sun Power Company -- oil was first discovered in Persia (present-day Iran), and served as the basis for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the progenitor of BP. One of the company’s biggest customers soon became Great Britain’s Royal Navy.

In 1914 Shuman said of the human impact of his work, “One thing I feel sure of, and that is that the human race must finally utilize direct sun power or revert to barbarism.” Prescient words when one considers that the world erupted into a bloody war powered by oil and coal by July of that same year -- little more than a year since the Sun Power Engine’s unveiling.

Shuman did not survive the First World War, passing away in 1918. It appears that his solar-powered engine and the hopes associated with it died with him. Today, discussions of energy extracted from the desert continue to focus on oil rather than the sun. Similarly, no physical trace remains of Maadi’s solar engine. Its site has been built over as the city found a different way to conquer that section of desert.

For more information on Maadi’s Sun Engine, also see:

www.sun1913.info

www.eoearth.org/article/Shuman_Frank

www.renewablebook.com/chapter-excerpts/350-2