Stan Meyer's first patent wasn't water: the 1976 solar heating system

Stan Meyer's first patent wasn't about water. US 3,970,070, Solar Heating System, filed 3 September 1975 and granted 20 July 1976 to Stanley A. Meyer and Stephen R. Gray, both of Columbus, Ohio. A dome of light-guide lenses, "having alternate high and low refractive surfaces", caps a stack of flat focusing lenses that concentrate sunlight down through an insulation layer into a heat store of high-absorption material, with a conventional heater as backup. The patent's claim is that it concentrates the sun "irrespective of the angle of the sun", so nothing has to move to follow it, where big solar plants still steer their mirrors and panels. He then built it as the solar silo in Grove City, which the local paper followed through 1976. On tape in 1990 he explained why: during the Arab embargo he concluded the world economy could collapse without a new, free and abundant energy source. The patent and the Grove City Record photographs are on stanslegacy.com.

About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.

Sources

• Stan Meyer at his garage · 1990 interview
• Stan Meyer · US 3,970,070, Solar Heating System · 1976
• Stan Meyer · US 3,970,070, Solar Heating System · 1976, Fig. 1
• Stan Meyer · US 3,970,070, Solar Heating System · 1976, Fig. 2
• Stan Meyer · The Grove City Record · April 1976
• The silo frame · The Grove City Record · July 1976
• Stan Meyer in the storage cavity · The Grove City Record · March 1976
• Stan Meyer and Stephen R. Gray, Solar Heating System, US 3,970,070 (20 July 1976) — stanslegacy.com
• Stan Meyer, 1990 interview at his garage, at 18:22 — stanslegacy.com
• The Grove City Record, March–July 1976 — stanslegacy.com