Going through patents that have fallen into the public domain, Cédric Carles – an enthusiast of new energy sources – realized that many innovations, abandoned or ignored at the time, could be brought up to date by our manufacturers to provide rapid and effective solutions to the ecological transition.
Hesitation around old patents
In his book Retrofuture – A Counter-History of Energy Innovations [Rétrofutur. Une contre-histoire des innovations énergétiques], Cédric Carles does not invite us to live like our grandparents did at the time, with a “candle or draft horse”. He draws our attention to these authors and engineers for whom ecology, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, already had a a special resonance. Let’s recall Jules Verne, in 1875, in The Mysterious Island which thought that “one day, hydrogen and oxygen would be inexhaustible sources providing heat and light” or Zola, who began to think of “a society based on solar energy”. Why do today’s industrialists not want to take advantage of this windfall? Perhaps they would rather develop their own patents in order to derive some financial gain… Fortunately, players in the collaborative and open source economy appear more interested in old patents than their elders.
Magnus and wind propulsion
What do the ships of the Finnish company NorsePower and the cargoes of the German company Enerco have in common? Their imposing rotor masts allow them to save 10% to 40% of fuel using wind turbine propulsion. Practically speaking, these wind masts, in the form of an approximately thirty-metre cylinder, rotate with lateral winds to create a force, a propulsion perpendicular to the wind. This innovation is simply an application of the Magnus effect, which was demonstrated by the German physicist Heinrich Gustav of the same name in 1852. By conferring a rotary motion to a ball, for example, a pressure differential is created which generates a deflection of trajectory without any additional energy input. It was not until 1924 that Anton Flettner exploited this principle on his boat Buckau, then 1980 with Commander Cousteau’s “turbosails”.
Bennett and the solar chimney
Nearly 120 years separate the first solar chimney patent – filed by the Englishman Alfred Rosling Bennett – and the Ashalim tower, located in the Negev desert in Israel, which is expected to provide energy for a city of 120,000 households. What happened between 1897 and 2018? Not much… aside from a Spanish engineer who suggested, in 1903, putting a solar tower alongside his house and a French engineer, Edgar Nazare, whose Nazare tower made headlines in 1960 but failed to convince the government of the benefits of his project, as they swore by nuclear energy at the time. Today, California, Morocco and Chile; tomorrow South Africa and China. These countries are making the turn to the energy transition, regardless of the cost and constraints. Such a project is just an area of 50,600 mirrors (that follow the sun) spread over 300 hectares (400 soccer fields) and a 240-metre-high tower within it on which the sun’s rays are reflected, heating the water to 600°C which, once transformed into steam, goes down to a turbine which, voila, produces energy!
As Cédric Carles thought, what good is it to develop one’s own farfetched innovation (sidewalks that produce electricity, plants that recharge our cell phones, etc.). The energy transition can no longer wait, so let us be inspired by past patents, and technology will do the rest!