The Sun hits Earth with an absurd amount of power, every year we get roughly 10,000 times more energy than humanity consumes from all fossil fuels combined. With numbers like that, it is suprising that solar isn’t already our primary energy source. That question isn’t new. In fact, more than a century ago an American inventor named Frank Shuman asked it too, and he actually built the world’s first functioning solar power station.
Shuman’s breakthrough began in the 1910s, when he developed a low-pressure solar steam engine using simple curved glass boxes to concentrate sunlight. In 1913, he convinced the British to fund a full-scale solar plant in Maadi, Egypt, where his system pumped thousands of liters of Nile water for irrigation. The idea was simple: if the Sun’s heat could boil water and drive turbines, entire industries could run without coal. Shuman believed solar was inevitable and he publicly argued that industrial nations needed to transition before fossil fuels ran out.
The world nearly listened. By the early 1930s, several engineers were preparing to scale up versions of Shuman’s design. But a global energy pivot arrived: new, cheap oil fields were discovered, especially in the Middle East and the Americas. Overnight, solar went from visionary to unnecessary. Petroleum became so abundant and inexpensive that complex solar installations looked slow, costly, and quaint. Investment dried up, prototypes were scrapped, and Shuman’s system slipped into obscurity. For almost forty years, no one revisited his ideas.
Only after the 1970s oil crises did the world rediscover his forgotten plans. By then, the modern solar industry was being reborn almost from scratch, unaware that many of its principles. Shuman’s story is a reminder of how easily technological paths can vanish when economics shift. Today, with solar finally becoming the cheapest energy source in history, his dream is resurfacing in full force.Go deeper: “Power from Sunshine”: A Business History of Solar Energy - Geoffrey Jones and Loubna Bouamane
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