Kamel al-Sabbah Proposes to King Faisal the Principle of Harnessing the Sun in the Arabian Desert

The utmost of Kamel al-Sabbah's ambitions was an invention that would harness the rays of the sun to light the cities and villages of the Arab lands. It was for the sake of this invention that he bought the airplane which was the cause of his death, for he hoped to fly in it over the Arab countries to carry out his experiments. Negotiations took place between him and the late lamented Faisal I for the establishment of plants to generate electric power and distribute it over all the Arab regions. Here is the text of the article the departed wrote in his own hand about this great project.

I have succeeded in devising a secondary electric battery in which an electric charge is generated merely by exposing it to the rays of the sun. To explain the nature of this battery, I say: let us suppose that we set out a number of them covering an area of one square mile in the midst of the Arabian desert, where there are no clouds. The power that could then be drawn from the sun would be two hundred million kilowatts ("volt"), or one hundred and forty million horsepower. The battery, however, can make use of only one part in ten thousand of this power, so that what would be obtained from the sun by means of these batteries would be an electric power of not less than one hundred thousand kilowatts ("volt") — that is, a power fifty times greater than the greatest power that can be obtained from the generators of the "Safa" river in Lebanon.

The electric power that is generated from the Safa river is a paltry fraction of the yearly power that falls upon the earth from the rays of the sun; this paltry fraction evaporates the water, which becomes clouds, then rain-clouds, then streams and rivers, then waterfalls. Hence the use of the sun's rays, or their conversion directly into electric power, without the use of steam or hydraulic ("water") engines and moving electric generators, is the natural, profitable way of using the rays of the sun. If we charge the batteries with electric charges from the sun's rays in the Arabian desert, it will be as though we had come upon oil wells, for what makes petroleum precious is the amount of power that lies hidden among its particles.

And let us suppose that we established a farm of solar electric batteries in the middle of the Arabian desert between Damascus and Baghdad, and then built electric automobiles that run on those batteries instead of on gasoline. The driver of the automobile would stop at each battery farm and exchange the batteries whose electric charge had been used up in driving his car for batteries which the sun's rays had filled with a full electric charge at that solar farm. By these means and their like, the Arabian desert can be turned into flourishing cities teeming with inhabitants, and its former glory will return to it.

I arrived at this discovery with instruments bought with my own money, and I worked in my own house and in my own time; and yet the general electric company would not allow me to take out the patent in my own name, and it is the company that will exploit this invention. Had I been working for one of the Arab governments, for example, this profit would have come back to it — and it is, as I said before, like many wells of petroleum and gasoline; that is, it holds a whole immense fortune.