Skip to content
Stan’s Legacy The Stanley Meyer Archive
Sign in

The Solar Silo

A trained optics technician knocked on a stranger's door in 1975 and spent three years baking lenses on their stove. Five newspaper articles, two patents, 371 drawings, ninety-eight per cent finished — and, the family say, it never worked.

The archive's own copy, 15 September 2026 60 MB

3 views

What was shown

Before the water fuel cell, before the dune buggy, before any of it, Stanley Meyer built a solar silo in a family's side yard in Grove City, Ohio. This is that story, and almost all of it is in the local paper.

The doorbell

From The car that ran on water, the Columbus Dispatch, 2007:

Julia Hughes, the youngest of their seven children, was 5 years old when Meyer rang the doorbell of her home on Marlane Drive. "His first few words were, 'The Lord sent me here to this home'"… she knew her parents didn't have room for a struggling inventor. Yet after visiting with the family for several hours, Meyer stayed the night, and then the next few years in the late 1970s. In return, Meyer built the family a solar silo… The structure required thousands of clear resin "light guides," a crude form of fiber optics, which Meyer baked and molded in the family kitchen. Julia Hughes recalled the chemical stench.

Three years in the Grove City Record
18 Mar 1976 "could have a phenomenal impact upon the national economy." Letters to President Ford and Governor Rhodes went unanswered.
29 Apr 1976 Half finished after six months. Ohio offered funding only if he surrendered patent rights; he refused — "because I want this system to get to the American people."
29 Jul 1976 The 4 July demonstration missed. Rain. "12 hours a day, six days a week since February."
29 Nov 1979 "Is it a big hoax, or our last hope? Who will decide?" A 24-foot silo, 24,000 BTU from a day's sun, under $10,000 installed.

Are those numbers sane?

Yes — and more modest than you would expect from a man accused of hoaxing.

24,000 BTU is 7.03 kWh. A 24-foot silo presents somewhere between 13 and 22 m² to the sun, and Ohio delivers about 4 kWh/m² a day. So he was claiming 8 to 13% of the sunlight landing on it. Flat-plate thermal collectors of the period ran at 30–50%. He published a figure below the technology he said he had beaten. Nobody inventing numbers lowballs them.

$10,000 in 1979 is about $45,000 today — roughly what a home solar and battery install costs now.

And the claim shrank as he built it: in 1976 it would power the whole house; by 1979 it was 24,000 BTU, about a quarter of a winter day's heat. That is what happens to everyone who actually builds the thing.

What survived

Light Guide Lens — 161 sheets of drawings, 371 figures, 10 claims, granted 30 June 1981. Cited by 34 later patents, from 1982 to 2026. One sheet every eleven days across the five years he was at it.

Where it is

Solar Energy Project Near Done - July 29th, 1976 ran a photograph of Meyer standing on the base, captioned "the base will house two heat energy storage tanks as well as a steam-driven engine." The same article gives the base as an eight-foot by six-foot deep steel tank.

A circular course of blockwork of about that width still stands in the garden on Marlane Drive, on the side of the house the Record called adjacent to the Hughes home. It is visible from the road in Street View imagery of October 2015 and in current satellite imagery, with a path worn through the grass to it.

The archive does not claim that ring is the base. It claims the ring is where the base was described as being, at the width it was described as having, and that nobody has yet laid a tape across it. That is an afternoon's work for anyone in Franklin County.

The house is a private residence. Its occupants have nothing to do with this story, the street number is not published here, and the archive asks that nobody knock on that door.

solar silo light guide lens US4275950 Grove City Record Charles Hughes Columbus Dispatch 1976 solar energy synthetic voice