CABINET / The Beautiful Possibility

Back in the 70s, readers of Popular Science magazine were regularly treated to a parade of electrical gadgets, outlandish vehicles, and the latest discoveries in materials science, all promising to change our lives in the near, if slightly indefinite, future. One typical article carried this description of a contraption erected in France: The traveler who visits the library of Tours sees in the courtyard in front a strange-looking apparatus. Imagine an immense truncated cone, a mammoth lampshade, with its concavity directed skyward... On the small base of the truncated cone rests a copper cylinder, blackened on the outside, its vertical axis being identical with that of the cone. Thanks to solar boilers like this one, readers were assured, “future generations, after the coal-mines have been exhausted, will have recourse to the sun for heat and energy. ... The sun will be the fuel of the future.” It is not strange that such an article was written in the 70s, when speculations on alterna

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