Harold R. Hay: Solar Pioneer
(Page 6 of 17)
September/October 1976
By Mother Earth News Editors
There were some difficult problems involved in this work, of course. I had to analyze the technical problems as a chemist, as an engineer, and as a production man. In the end we found some very simple solutions to the questions we faced, and we increased both the capacity of the mills and the quality of the boards they manufactured by 25%. This was, I think, a rather major development ... and we did it mostly by showing our engineers how to be better housekeepers. We put in some scrubbers and we showed the people who ran the mills how to keep the wires clean that the hardboard pressed up against during one step of its manufacture. It was that simple.
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PLOWBOY: And I'm sure that, just as soon as you had that one licked, you went out looking for new worlds to conquer.
HAY: Well, at the time, Truman began advocating his Point Four Program and—since I'd been proposing something like that at both the U.S. Embassy and the State Department for some time—I thought I had to be a part of it.
So I came back to the States and offered my services and—because of my interdisciplinary background—was hired by the Housing and Home Finance Agency which, after about a year and a half, sent me to India as International Building Materials Advisor.
Now in India I was soon embarrassed because they wanted me to build a house. And I'd never done that before. Here I was the Official Building Materials Man ... and I'd never built a house.
So I sat down and studied the situation and realized that the main limitation I faced was the sheer poverty of the people for whom I'd be designing my dwelling. These people had virtually no money at all, and only the very simplest of tools to work with. So I designed a mud-walled, thatched-roof and bamboo house of one room plus kitchen. It had a simple little cowshed, alongside and the stove was just a ten-quart bucket propped up on a couple of bricks. It wasn't much, but it cost just $80 ... which was within the means of the market I was designing the house for.
And then, in four stages, we upgraded that very simple dwelling until it was a very, very respectable home which still cost only $500. We got some nice publicity with that house in India and in the British journals and everyone declared it a success ... even though I thought it was rather unsuccessful.
PLOWBOY: Why?
HAY: I wasn't physically comfortable in the place. To save bricks, you see, I had kept the building's walls fairly low and then I had topped it with an asbestos roof. When I walked around inside, with that hot roof right over my head, I could feel a lot of heat radiating down on me. I thought the house was a failure.
In the long run, however, that was the building's greatest success. Because it got me to thinking about how I could build a really comfortable dwelling there in India with nothing but a very few readily available materials. Without electricity, without air conditioning, without all the crutches that designers and architects back here in the States take for granted.
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