Maria Telkes helped create the first solar-heated house, completed in Dover, Massachusetts, in 1948.
Telkes, a Hungarian-American physical chemist, collaborated with architect Eleanor Raymond on the Dover Sun House. The project used solar collectors and Glauber’s salt as a heat-storage medium, allowing collected solar energy to warm the building after sunset.
The house was an important demonstration that solar heat could be stored rather than used only when sunlight was available. Telkes later worked on solar cooking, desalination, and other technologies for using renewable energy.
The phrase “first solar house” can refer to several earlier experimental buildings using passive solar design. The Dover house is specifically associated with Telkes’s active solar-heating and thermal-storage system.