Mária Telkes came to the U.S. in 1932 with a driving ambition: to invent ways to harness and store the power of the sun. The future luminary was well on her way. Born in Hungary in 1900, Telkes earned her doctorate in physical chemistry by the time she was 24.
AMERICAN EXPERIENCE’s The Sun Queen tells her story—one of a prodigious intellect navigating a perfect storm of obstacles. The film can be seen on pbs.org and the PBS App.
As the U.S. entered World War II, energy was scarce and the idea of creating houses that could run without coal or oil was more attractive than ever. MIT had established its Solar Energy Fund in 1938 to bring together the best minds in the field. Telkes joined up and devoted her energies to developing a prototype house that could not only collect solar power but store it.
Undercut and thwarted by her male colleagues at almost every turn, Telkes was removed from the project when her experimental system failed. Without support for her work at male-dominated MIT, she sought new backers and eventually gained the aid of wealthy Boston philanthropist Amelia Peabody and pioneering architect Eleanor Raymond. The visionary troika ultimately succeeded with the completion of the Dover Sun House, the first modern U.S. home heated entirely with solar power, in Dover, Mass., in 1948.
It was a pioneering project. Nonetheless, “Sexism played a huge role in why Mária Telkes isn’t a name that we all know,” said Amanda Pollak, director and producer of The Sun Queen. “She also just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—many ingredients have to converge for scientific gains to be made.”
In fact, just as Telkes was making progress in the years after the war, cheap oil flooded the U.S. economy. “The world suddenly no longer was thinking about scarcity of energy. That totally derailed interest in solar power,” said Pollak.
When Pollak and Gene Tempest, writer and producer, set out to make the film, they knew very little about Telkes. “At first that felt very daunting, but then it became a lot of fun as we discovered photos, letters and people who knew her,” said Tempest.
“It was exciting that as filmmakers we were going to break new ground on this,” Tempest continued. “Film is often thought of as the translator of the written word, but we had the opportunity to go deep in the primary sources and find things that had not been published before.”
As the pair dug into the project, the war in Ukraine influenced the way they saw the film and its relevance today. “As the war heated up, the questions of energy scarcity and global access to energy started to come to the fore in a really different way,” said Tempest.
The Sun Queen is something of a wake-up call, added Pollak. “There is a real recognition of the limits of our planet, and we need to operate with a sense of scarcity and conserve energy,” she said. “Telkes’ story is a reminder not to take anything for granted.”
It’s a reminder of the power of persistence, as well. That helps to make it a “perfect” AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film, said the series’ Executive Producer Cameo George. “It’s an inspiring story about a woman in STEM who would not take no for an answer. It’s also a story about a visionary. Americans love visionaries. We love genius. We love someone who is thinking out of the box.”
Watch the trailer here.
