Maria Telkes

Maria Telkes was a Hungarian-born American biophysicist and chemist who devoted her career to practical solar energy technology and became known as the Sun Queen. During the Second World War she developed a solar still that produced fresh drinking water from seawater, carried aboard life rafts and credited with saving downed airmen and shipwrecked sailors at sea. In 1948, working with the architect Eleanor Raymond, she designed the heating system of the Dover Sun House in Dover, Massachusetts, one of the first houses heated entirely by solar energy, using sodium sulfate decahydrate salt to store the sun's heat by day and release it through the cold New England nights. She held more than twenty patents across her career and continued researching solar ovens and thermal storage materials into her later years.