ITALY’S ARCHIVE ON THE HISTORY OF SOLAR ENERGY

C. Silvi

Gruppo per la storia dell’energia solare (GSES) — Via Nemorense, 18 — 00199 Rome, Italy

E-mail: csilvi@gses. it

Abstract

This paper reviews research and organizational activities for the creation of the Italy’s Archive on the History of Solar Energy, a project started in 2003. The project’s main purpose is to preserve the Italian heritage of solar energy use, creating a digital archive accessible via the Internet. The first branch of what will be a geographically distributed archive has been taking shape over the past years at the Luigi Micheletti Foundation and the Eugenio Battisti Museum of Industry and Work (www. musil. bs. it) in Brescia, in northern Italy. An important step forward came in 2006, when the “Italian National Committee ‘The History of Solar Energy’” (CONASES), a multidisciplinary non-profit entity, was established by the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, following a proposal by the Group for the History of Solar Energy (GSES, www. gses. it). In 2008, a cooperation agreement on a nationwide survey of sources on solar energy, signed between the State Archives Department and GSES, opened up new prospects for further development of the Archive. Examples of archives and documents already collected and under study are provided. The paper also shows that the Solar Archive project is already rewriting Italian solar energy history.

Keywords: solar archive, solar history, solar pioneers, solar architecture, solar cities,

1. Introduction

It often happens that we think of solar energy (its direct and indirect forms, wind, hydro, forests and other biomass) as an aspect of our modern world, although it had powered everything on earth until 150-200 years ago, when its fossilized forms — coal, oil and gas — began to gain sway.

For thousands and thousands of years the use of solar energy shaped human settlements and cities, farming and forestry, architecture and buildings, landscapes and territories, religious beliefs and cultures, social relations and lifestyles on Earth — in a word, whole civilizations. The use of solar energy is thus an age-old experience marked by milestones on the path that led human beings to artificially convert it into other useful forms of energy and goods: food, construction materials, heat, fuel, daylight and, more recently, electricity, which has been, is and will continue to be a fundamental part of modern life.

Discoveries in the field of solar energy use, made during what I would propose to call the primitive or ancient solar age — when solar was the sole source of energy — still have a major role in our daily lives. This is well exemplified by the Romans’ discovery of windowpane glass in the first century A. D., to bring daylight inside buildings and at the same time prevent cold and winds from entering. Today millions upon millions of windows provide daylight to homes and workplaces all over the world, thereby saving on artificial light produced with electricity generated by fossil and nuclear fuels.

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An additional example is provided by farming and agriculture. From the earliest civilizations they were powered, and continue to be powered today, by solar energy as the primary and principal energy source.

These technologies and discoveries, which have evolved throughout the centuries, are still of greatest importance in our daily lives. It is as if an ancient renewable-solar-energy soul were an essential part of our modern world, taken for granted and not accounted for in official energy-use and economic statistics. Therefore, the history of solar energy can hold important lessons for our own times, when humanity is beset by a growing number of problems, closely related to the use and availability of energy.

Since 2000 GSES, a volunteer not-profit organization formed by experts and scholars from various technical fields, has been promoting and organizing initiatives aimed at producing a systematic history of the use of solar energy. In this paper, the focus is on modern or future solar age, currently sprouting from the pioneering work on solar energy done over the last centuries, in particular during the last 150-200 years.