Harry Thomason - Solar Energy
(Page 2 of 13)
November/December 1979
By Richard Freudenberger
THOMASON: Certainly. I was visiting my wife's family home near Burlington, North Carolina back in the summer of 1956, and-as I was out walking-one of those summer showers suddenly blew up. I ran for cover beneath a rusty old tin barn roof and, as I passed under that overhang, the rain falling from it actually felt warm . . . markedly more so than did the water from the downpour. At that moment I realized that the dark, rusty roof was a solar heat collector . . . and that something similiar to it could be put to use.
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PLOWBOY: And so you just followed through with your discovery then and there.
THOMASON: Well no, not exactly. You see, I was working for the U.S. Patent Office at the time and attending law school at night. I wanted to do more with the solar collector idea, but-besides the fact that I was obviously short of time-I couldn't have applied for a patent to protect my efforts, since Patent Office employees are prohibited from personally applying for such "invention protection". So to make a long story short . . . I quit my job, started working for the Army Signal Corps, and devoted my evenings and weekends to designing and building a solar heating system which I later patented.
PLOWBOY: I assume that you had some practical knowledge in construction be fore you tackled the job . . . was this experience gained in the course of your work with the Patent Office, or had you done hands-on building in earlier years?
THOMASON: Let's see ... I'd better start at the beginning. I was born in 1923 in Salisbury, North Carolina and graduated from Woodheath High School. After that I attended Catawba College at Salisbury for three years . . . until I joined the United States Merchant Marine. While in the service I was a machinist and a refrigeration engineer . . . among other things. Believe me, I got plenty of practical experience during those years. After the war, I went back to Catawba College, finished my final semester there in 1947, and began working as a Patent Examiner later that same year.
I spent 10 years with the Patent Office. During that stint, I built houses for rental income in my spare time. You can see that I was no babe in the woods in terms of my construction or mechanical experience . . . in fact, you might say that developing my own solar energy system was just an extension of the kind of work I'd been doing all along.
PLOWBOY: I see. So when did you actually build your first sun-heated house?
THOMASON: Well, we completed the house-which, incidentally, we call Solaris No. 1-in 1959. But I had been working on collectors and flow systems for some time before that, and actually applied for my first patent in '58. I moved my family into that three-bedroom house just before the winter of 1959 hit, and we lived there until 1962.
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