Fuelling the future.

In his short story ‘Let There Be Light’, the science-fiction author Robert A Heinlein introduced the energy source that would power his Future History series of stories and novels. First published in Super Science Stories magazine in May 1940, it described the Douglas-Martin sunpower screens that would provide (almost) free and inexhaustible energy to fuel the future in subsequent instalments of his alternative timeline. It was simple, robust and reliable technology. ‘We can bank ’em in series to get any required voltage; we can bank in parallel to get any required current, and the power is absolutely free, except for the installation costs,’ marvelled one of the inventors as they worked out the new technology’s potential for rupturing the social order of the future.

Installation of the first successful solar panel and
 solar battery (a solar array), for the Georgia telephone
 carrier Americus, 4 October 1955.

The sunpower screens were clay-coated panels that absorbed sunlight and turned it into electricity with almost 100 per cent efficiency, or worked the other way to turn electricity into light. Like most of Heinlein’s Future History stories, this one offered readers a calculated blend of technology and culture. The sunscreens weren’t technology from nowhere – they fitted into a particularly American history of invention that emphasised individual ingenuity against corporate and collective power: in the popular imagination, they were the descendants of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. The story was stamped with Heinlein’s own distinctive brand of anti-corporate politics that emphasised individuals’ responsibility for making their own futures.

Read the Aeon story - “Fuelling the future.”