Aubrey Eneas

Aubrey Eneas was an American engineer and entrepreneur who built some of the earliest working solar-thermal power systems and founded the Solar Motor Company of Boston around 1900 to commercialize them. His design used a large parabolic reflector, built from many small mirrored panes and roughly thirty three feet across, to concentrate sunlight onto a boiler and drive a steam engine. Eneas installed a working solar motor at an ostrich farm near Pasadena, California, in the early 1900s to pump irrigation water, one of the first documented commercial uses of solar power in the United States, and it drew considerable public and press attention as a demonstration of the sun's mechanical potential. His reflectors proved fragile against severe weather and expensive compared to the cheap fossil fuels of the era, and after further installations met similar problems Eneas's company failed and he abandoned solar power around 1910. His brief but genuine commercial venture is remembered as one of the first attempts to build a business around solar-generated mechanical power, decades before photovoltaic technology existed.