Mária Telkes

She invented the first solar-heated home in history. In 1948.

In 1942, American pilots shot down over the Pacific weren’t dying from bullets.

They were dying from thirst.

So the U.S. government turned to a Hungarian-born physicist: Mária Telkes.

She built a solution the size of a paper cup.

An inflatable, solar-powered desalination kit.

It used sunlight to evaporate seawater, separate the salt, and recondense it into drinkable water.

But that was just one of her 20+ inventions powered by the sun.

Telkes was born in Budapest in 1900.

At 25, she immigrated to the U.S. and started her career at the Cleveland Clinic, studying brainwaves with surgeon George Washington Crile.

Together they co-wrote “Phenomenon of Life” and developed a photoelectric device to record brain activity.

In 1937, she became a U.S. citizen.

In 1939, MIT launched its Solar Energy Conversion Project and hired Telkes to join.

She focused on thermal storage, which she called the critical bottleneck of solar power.

Her answer: phase-change materials.

She used Glauber’s salt (sodium sulfate) which could absorb heat as it melted and release it again as it cooled.

In 1948, she teamed up with architect Eleanor Raymond and philanthropist Amelia Peabody to build the Dover Sun House. The first modern residence heated entirely by the sun.

Sunlight passed through windows, heated air, and melted sodium sulfate stored inside the walls.

As it cooled, the salt released heat and kept the house warm.

Unfortunately, the system broke down in its third winter.

MIT blamed Telkes.

She got fired in 1953.

So she moved to NYU’s College of Engineering and received a $45,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to design a solar oven.

Her design reached 350°F, worked in the evening, and cost only $4 to build.

Telkes then spent some time at Cryo-Therm, where she built temperature-resistant materials for the Apollo missions and Polaris missiles.

In 1971, she helped build Solar One at the University of Delaware, the first house in the world to generate both heat and electricity from the sun.

In 1980, she worked with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop the Carlisle House, the first fully solar-powered home.

By the time she died in 1995, Telkes had published over 100 papers and filed more than 20 patents.

She won the first Society of Women Engineers Achievement Award in 1952.

She received lifetime achievement awards from the National Academy of Sciences.

And she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2012.