Farrington Daniels

Chemist and solar energy scientist at the University of Wisconsin (Solar Energy Laboratory, Engineering Experiment Station). Author of Direct Use of the Sun’s Energy (Yale University Press, 1964) — the canonical pre-oil-crisis survey of solar energy science, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation over nine years (with Guggenheim Foundation support in earlier phases). The book grew out of Sigma Xi lectures at Yale (1960) and Daniels’ visits to scientists in non-industrialized countries; it is oriented toward practical, low-cost applications buildable in small laboratories.

Daniels represents the scientific establishment’s approach to solar energy: institution-funded, laboratory-based, empirical, international in scope. His book surveys all known methods of solar energy use, from cooking to cooling to photovoltaic conversion.

Chapter 8.4 — Water Ponds (p. 104): Tabor’s salt-gradient ponds (Dead Sea brine) for heat storage and power generation — these are heating ponds, not Hay’s cooling roof ponds. The concept of water-as-thermal-mass is shared; the application is different.

Chapter 12 — Selective Radiation Surfaces: Surface physics of high solar absorptivity + low infrared emissivity — the physics behind both unglazed solar collector efficiency and nocturnal radiative cooling.

Chapter 13 — Cooling and Refrigeration (§13.3): The most important section for the archive. Daniels documents that nocturnal radiation cooling yields 10–35 BTU/ft²/hr (2.9–10.3 W/ft²). Bliss in Arizona used a 280 ft² black cloth radiator to store 120,000 BTU of “cold” in a 10-ton rock bed — 2 tons of refrigeration — reported at the 1961 UN Conference on New Sources of Energy, six years before Hay’s Phoenix prototype and decades before Baer’s Cool Cell. Also: the chapter notes that solar collectors for heating should be “uncovered when used for cooling by nocturnal radiation” — the di-thermal surface concept.

The 1958 Yanagimachi reference (cited in Ch. 9 footnotes) proposes combining solar + nocturnal radiation cooling + radiant panel + heat pump as a year-round air-conditioning system — the conceptual ancestor of the Cool Cell, articulated 44 years before the Cool Cell brochure.

Harry Thomason appears in the 1961 UN Conference references (Ch. 9 footnote 174) — placing him in the same scientific literature that Daniels surveyed.

Unit correspondence: Daniels’ “10–35 BTU/ft²/hr” = 2.9–10.3 W/ft², directly matching Baer’s experimental finding of “night radiation exceeds 9.5 W/ft²” (heated-vs-unheated-plates, 2002). The same physics, confirmed across 38 years.

The book’s preface is dated January 1964 — concurrent with Holly Baer’s first rhombus-icoso-dodecahedron model (December 1964). The elib markdown is searchable at ~/Projects/elib-direct-use-of-the-suns-energy/output/markdown/ (3,821 lines).

Farrington Daniels

See also