by Terese Svoboda
The year 1909 was the first time George H. Cove vanished. He claimed he was kidnapped and threatened with death if he continued developing his patent on solar panels. One story has it that an investor arranged the kidnapping to discredit him, and that instead of death, he was offered a furnished house and $25,000 (almost a million dollars in today’s money) if he would cease promotion of his solar panels. Newspapers went crazy and he was subsequently accused of arranging the kidnapping as a publicity stunt. But Cove already had plenty of publicity, one would say too much, newspapers lauding his efforts and investors pouring money into his work.
The police dismissed the kidnapping as a hoax. Were they paid off? His rivals, Edison, Westinghouse, and Standard Oil, were notorious in stamping out competition. All three were known to use extreme measures to protect their market share. Cove had been fronted (framed?) by Elmer Burlingame, who issued stock he did not own in Cove’s Sun Electric Generator Company. When this was revealed, investors went sour. In 1911, after raising $160 million in today’s money, his company declared bankruptcy. Cove was arrested for stock fraud and went to jail for a year. Perhaps he should have gone into stealth mode.
“Given two days’ sun, it will store sufficient electrical energy to light an ordinary house for a week” was Cove’s pitch.While his solar panels didn’t generate much electricity in comparison with Westinghouse and Edison’s inventions, he’d invented something much more important, the photovoltaic generator, that is, a way to get electricity directly from the sun. He did not understand how the solar panel worked, but neither did anybody else at the time. This technology would not be investigated again until the 1950s at Bell Labs, and then with silicon rather than the simpler version that Cove stumbled on.
Son of a Canadian tinkerer who held a patent for a clothes dryer in 1870, George was just as enthusiastic as his father about inventing. When he was 25, he went temporarily blind working on a patent for “a piano that will reproduce any music ever played by turning on an electric current no matter how many years elapsed since the original playing,” but he was primarily interested in alternative energy. In 1906 the Canadian government awarded him a gold medal for his plan for harnessing the tides of the Bay of Fundy. He built his first solar electric generator in 1904-05 and a few years later placed a model in the Metropole Building in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Savvy enough to send a description of the device to American investors, he moved to Somerville, Massachusetts on their money and opened his own lab. He quickly moved to a lab near Wall Street, the neighborhood of the many other energy startups of the period. It was in October 1909, the same year he patented his invention, moved to Massachusetts and New York City and issued stock, when he was allegedly kidnapped.
Twenty years earlier, Edison stopped the development of the thermo-electrical generator by buying the company and stopping all research. Widespread use of the Cove’s solar electric generator might well have reduced growing demand for Edison’s coal and oil-fired generating stations. With regard to his closest competitor Westinghouse, Edison alleged that the alternating current was unsafe and proposed the slanderous term “Westinghousing” for public execution by AC current. And of course, there was discouraging Tesla, the disruptive genius of the 20th century. Edison promised him $50,000 if he’d solve his DC problems. When Tesla returned with the solution, Edison reneged. George Westinghouse gave Tesla a generous contract to solve his AC problems. Though good to his employees, Westinghouse had his own problems with Edison’s industrial espionage. In the struggle between Edison and Westinghouse to harness the power of Niagara Falls, Westinghouse blueprints found their way to GE. The third player, Standard Oil, was so ruthless that its behavior was the reason behind the passage of America’s first anti-trust laws.
Cove disappeared a second time after his year in jail. There is no mention of him, not even a death certificate, following his sentencing, except for a 1920 patent filing with his brother for a musical instrument. He’d returned to his earlier enthusiasm, perhaps the one that nearly made him blind.
The third time Cove vanished was in 2021. He seemed to have been literally erased from his own invention when an 1884 postcard showing a rooftop solar panel was published in the Smithsonian magazine and attributed to another inventor, Charles Fritts,who made the first selenium cell. In “Untangling the Mystery of the World’s First Rooftop Solar Panel,” online investigator Foeke Postma used geolocation and extensive research to show another nearly identical photo with Cove, not Fritts, posed behind the array on a Maiden Lane rooftop in downtown NYC. Another angle shows him again on the same rooftop in 1910. Postma concluded that Cove had not been photoshopped out but that a third postcard image existed without Cove and it had been misattributed to Fritts. Although Fritts worked in a lab not far from Cove’s, Postma pointed out that his rooftop view had to be completely different.[1]
“Everybody knows that the amount of the natural power that is going to waste every day is inconceivable,” predicted Cove. His rooftop solar panel was not only revolutionary for its time, it’s still revolutionary now. Bell Labs’ selenium cell is expensive to produce – both energy-wise and financially. Cove’s photovoltaic cell produced more energy with much less energy input. As Kris De Decker wrote in Low-Tech Magazine: “If you were to build the cells exactly the way Cove did by press-fitting the caps and then overwrapping them with wire to try to keep them tight, they would also be easier to recycle, being strictly a mechanical operation, no chemicals need to be involved. It would be labor-intensive to put them together and take them apart again, but it could be automated, too.”[2]
Marxists would say that technologies are promoted if they increase the wealth and power of the mighty, and are suppressed if they don’t. The fossil fuel industry promoted themselves and discouraged any other power source. The moral of the story, aside from capitalism’s destructive ways, is that far too often what inventors come up with is discarded because something else makes more money. This can be very discouraging. The mind of an inventor is a delicate thing, like the artist’s. “Chance events coupled with positive feed-back rather than technological superiority will often determine economic development” writes W. Brian Arthur in Scientific American.[3]
Cove should not vanish again. His work should be taken up by those wanting to see low-tech solar power available to all at a reasonable price.
***
Sources:
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/view/17744/22231
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/133971505
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/download/17744/22231
[1]
[1] Postma, Foeke. “Untangling the Mystery of the World’s First Rooftop Solar Panel.” Bellingcat. 16 Aug 2023. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/08/16/untangling-the-mystery-of-the-worlds-first-rooftop-solar-panel/?utm_source=twitter
[2]
[2] De Decker, Kris. “How to Build a Low-tech Solar Panel?” Low-Tech Magazine. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/10/how-to-build-a-low-tech-solar-panel 5 Oct 2021.
[3]
[3] Arthur, W. Brian. “Positive Feedbacks in the Economy.” Scientific American. Vol. 262, No. 2 (Feb 1990). 92-99.