FORBES @ 100: JUNE 15, 1929

In which Thomas Edison makes fanciful predictions about the future of solar power.

asked IN 1929 to describe the current life stage of the electric age, its father, Thomas Edison, summed it up succinctly: “Yelling baby.” In other words, it had a great future ahead of it—but a lot of growing up to do.

Edison went further and boldly forecast what he expected would happen when the industry matured a little. He believed that “mankind will draw electrical energy on a large scale directly from the sun,” Forbes’ Dudley Nichols wrote. As Edison put it, “Man will always be able to create from nature as much power as he will need.”

Scientists had been studying the core idea of solar power, the photoelectric effect, for the previous century; seven years earlier, Albert Einstein had won a Nobel Prize for his work on it. But Edison’s prediction hasn’t come true. It has been nearly 70 years since three Bell Labs scientists developed silicon photovoltaic cells—the first technology capable of converting sunlight into enough energy to power common electrical equipment—and still less than 1% of U.S. energy comes from the sun.