Frank Shuman

Frank Shuman was an American engineer and inventor who built the worlds first large-scale solar thermal power plant, completed in 1913 near Cairo, Egypt, using long parabolic mirrors to concentrate sunlight and boil water into steam that drove a pumping engine used for irrigation. Shumans plant, at Maadi, demonstrated on an industrial scale that concentrated solar heat could substitute for burning coal to produce mechanical power, a concept that decades later became the basis of modern concentrating solar power stations. He had earlier built smaller experimental solar collectors in the United States and predicted, in writings published shortly before his death, that solar energy would eventually need to replace fossil fuels as coal reserves were depleted. His Egyptian solar plant, though shut down after the outbreak of the First World War interrupted its operation and funding, remained the largest solar power installation in the world for decades after it was built.