Harry Thomason

American solar pioneer and inventor of the “Solaris” solar heating system. Presented “Solar Space Heating, Water Heating, Cooling in the Thomason Home” at the 1961 United Nations Conference on New Sources of Energy, Rome (documented in Daniels, Direct Use of the Sun’s Energy, 1964, footnote 174 in Ch. 9) — placing him in the same scientific literature as Harold Hay, Bliss, and Yanagimachi. With his son Jack, he built three solar houses in Washington DC — Baer documented the cost at $1–2 per square foot — at a time when industry claimed solar was impractical. (The “Solaris” trade name is standard solar-history attribution; it does not appear in this archive’s sources, which describe the system only via the 1961 paper title.)

Baer documented Thomason’s exclusion from the NSF/University of Maryland solar meeting in Washington DC, March 21–23, 1973 (Sunspots, Ch. 11): while Alcoa and Texas Instruments sat at the table, Thomason was “kept in the audience. He has not received money from NSF or any other government agency.” The contrast sharpened Baer’s argument against government-funded solar as a vehicle for industry capture.

Harold Hay grouped Thomason with Baer as “creative activists” — people who “took their own time and money and worked with their own hands to develop solar energy systems that work.” All three were working independently in the late 1960s and early 1970s before DOE and NSF became dominant in solar funding.

See also

• Steve Baer
• Harold Hay
• Sunspots: Collected Facts and Solar Fiction
• Tax, shine, and sunshine
• 1961 UN Conference on New Sources of Energy — the Rome conference where Thomason presented his solar home paper
• Ray Bliss — fellow independent solar pioneer in the same 1961 conference literature, likewise named by Baer as ignored
• 1973 NSF solar meeting — the Washington DC meeting where Thomason was kept in the audience while industry sat at the table