Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [41]
The electric rail lines that united every major American city in the early decades of the 1900s—and made robber barons like Whitney rich—were eventually ripped out of the ground and paved over. We now live in the cities we built for our cars, locked into a transportation system that is dependent on low oil prices in a world that no longer finds that prerequisite guaranteed.
The good news is that the last time Americans got fed up with a transportation system, they tossed it out when presented with an alternative they liked more, despite the wrenching changes it brought to communities and entire ways of life.
chapter 11
Solar Hot Water, Day and Night
ON ANY OLD EVENING in October 1929, one might have found Death Valley Scotty and his patron, Albert Mussey Johnson, coming back from a horseback ride among the rattlesnakes and scorpions to the sprawling Moorish villa that Johnson had built in the hottest place on earth, miles from nowhere. However, nights could still get a little nippy. And if one of them wanted a hot shower out in the middle of nowhere, he could have one courtesy of a new Day and Night Solar Hot Water Heater, which the duo had gotten installed earlier that month.1
Johnson was an insurance magnate and millionaire (even after the stock market crash that lit the Depression’s fuse) who hailed from Chicago. Scotty was from Kentucky, but he had hung around long enough in Death Valley to become part of its natural fauna. He had been a cowboy in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and a confidence man for years. One of his first marks had been the city slicker, Johnson. Somehow, however, they became friends. No one is quite sure why.2
Neither, though, was known to be much of an environmentalist, or, as they might have been known then, conservationists. Why, then, install a solar hot water heater?
It wasn’t that they did not have other sources of power available. They used the force of an underground spring to do mechanical work and run a generator, and they had diesel generators, too. During the same reconstruction of Scotty’s Castle, as the compound became known, they also installed fuel tanks. They certainly could have decided to install some other kind of water heater. Day and Night itself offered a gas version of its heater.3
The fact of the matter is that the solar heater was probably the best option they had. Built from simple materials—concrete, copper loops painted black to absorb heat, and glass—the heater worked well, even if in the winter months, the water was warm, not hot. It could store 120 gallons of warm to hot water, as the name implies, all through the night.
The decision was a common one for consumers in southern California. The Day and Night Solar Heater Company was already generating $230,000 a year in revenue as far back as 1923, its owner William J. Bailey bragged to his Rotary group in Monrovia, California.4 The Los Angeles Times even covered the rise of the company, noting in the subheadline, “Factory Forced to Move to Larger Quarters Twice as Demand Grows.”5
Bailey had been trained as a mechanical engineer at the University of Michigan and then worked as a machinery designer at the Carnegie Steel Mills. Sent to California for the weather’s salubrious effects on health, he decided to get into the solar hot water game in 1909, in concert with inventor Gilbert Cartter.6 Bailey filed a patent application in April of that year and received it the following August.7 They were in business.
But they weren’t the only game in town. Clarence M. Kemp’s Climax solar water heater had come into widespread use in the years following its development in 1891. Two Pasadena businessmen paid Kemp $250 in 1895 for the right