Melting Quarters With Your Old TV

We didn’t have Internet when I was a little kid, so, like many of the Atari and Nintendo generation, we opted for more traditional activities during our spare time.

Burning and blowing things up was the clear choice for my cadre of future overgrown little boys, and between the ages of 8 and, oh, about 12, that was one of our favorite after-school, before-school, and occasionally instead-of-school activities.

We did it all, from the magnifying glass to the pipe-bomb, with police and fire department personnel joining in to reverse the effects of our entertainment on more than one occasion.

I’d like to say that the pre-adolescent obsession with using heat or chemicals to molecularly disassociate things like GI Joes, remote control cars, and the occasional discarded television has since passed, but traces of it still do pop up every now and then.

The most recent relapse into the fun and exciting world of pyromania took place last summer, down in Bethany Beach.

Drinking IPAs and perusing the small junkyard that my dad had accumulated in the basement of our family beach house, my cousin and I came across the partial remains of an old projection TV that had been disassembled on one of the upper levels and transported, in pieces, downstairs, for permanent storage.

It was a big, bulky model like the kind pictured below.

One particular component immediately caught my eye.

A few weeks earlier, I’d seen a YouTube video where the plastic screen cover — the face of the screen itself — from just such a television had been used to focus a beam of sunlight onto a stack of pennies.

The effect was incredible and almost instantaneous.

So we finished our beer, yanked the plastic screen face off the dismembered television, and proceeded outside with it.

It was a clear, sunny summer day, and I could feel the anticipatory adrenaline coursing through my veins.

Don’t Try This at Home

I didn’t have a stack of pennies, but I did have a quarter, so I dropped it on the driveway, took two corners of the rectangular screen, with my cousin holding the opposite two, and started to focus the sunlight.

What happened next defied my concept of reality… The quarter, shiny one second, tarnished instantly, and then started to sag over the coarse bits of pebble and stone imbedded in the concrete of the driveway.

We put the screen down and examined the dead coin, which now looked like it had emerged from the imagination of Salvador Dalí.

The quarter had been partially liquefied, with the shape of Washington’s head still recognizable but stretched, wrinkled, and generally distorted.

Now, just to put things into perspective a bit here… A quarter is about 92% copper, with the remaining 8% coming in the form of a nickel exterior. 

Copper melts at 1,984 degrees Fahrenheit — or about three and a half times the temperature at which wood auto-ignites (bursts into flame spontaneously).

The amount of sunlight required to generate heat sufficient to raise the quarter to and past this temperature in mere seconds was relatively insignificant.

The TV had been a 50 incher, with a total viewing area of 1,200 square inches.

The screen we’d been using, called a Fresnel lens, was nothing more than a thin, plastic, rectangular magnifying glass.

The main differences between a Fresnel lens and what you normally imagine when you think of a magnifying glass are weight, shape, and size of the magnification area.

Otherwise, the effect is similar. And in this case, that effect caused 1,200 square inches of sunlight — a photonic density that feels nice and cozy against your skin on a clear day — to be concentrated on maybe 1 square inch.

The result: a death ray capable of melting through almost anything.

And that was just from a single 50-inch screen.

Nuclear Fusion… And It’s Yours, Free of Charge

What if that number were multiplied by 10, or by 100, or by 10,000?

If you’re getting the idea that the power of the sun is basically an infinite, free source of energy, it’s because that was my point.

Imagining the amount of coal you’d need to stoke a blast furnace to the point where it too could melt a quarter — it would be in the pounds — gives you an idea of just how less ideal the process could be, and has been, since our economy began running on fossil fuels more than a century ago.

According to National Geographic, every singly hour, the Earth absorbs enough photons from the sun to provide the entire planet’s energy needs for an entire year.

To the layman, the immediate question then is: Why isn’t solar energy powering everything?

Why aren’t there solar farms and solar cell arrays in every field and on the roof of every building?

Well, turns out there doesn’t even really need to be. The infographic below, provided by Tech Insider, illustrates just how much actual area would be required to power all of humanity’s needs.

Less than 500,000 square kilometers total, or 180,000 square miles, would be enough.

That’s about the square mileage of California — and it would be all we needed, not today, but in the year 2030, after 14 more years of population growth, urbanization, and industrial development.

So why isn’t this happening? If the goal of a carbon-free energy supply system is realistic, where is all the progress?

Well, the answer to that lies as much in technology as it does in bureaucracy.

The latter problem — the bureaucracy, which comes as part of a general disdain for solar from the industrial and economic establishment — is finally fading.

Undermined, Delayed, Side-Tracked, but Not Stopped

There is simply too much money in solar, and too much potential, that even major oil companies like Shell and BP are making major investments researching the technology and developing infrastructure.

But the technical side itself… That remains a problem.

Efficiency, longevity, reliability… All of these issues continue to stifle wider acceptance and delay the inevitable: a complete reorganization of how humanity’s electricity is harvested.

Technical problems, especially those standing in the way of progress of this magnitude, have a way of getting solved.

And today, we’re closer than ever to realizing what many of us have been predicting for decades.

Just a handful of companies, all of them names you’ve probably not heard before, are making the most important leaps forward.

In the process, they’re bringing the rest of the industry into a golden era for solar energy, and not a moment too soon.

Like I said, you’ve probably never heard the names of these companies before, but you will soon.

To find out their stories and see where they might take the solar industry in the coming years, click here.

Fortune favors the bold,

Alex Koyfman

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His flagship service, Microcap Insider, provides market-beating insights into some of the fastest moving, highest profit-potential companies available for public trading on the U.S. and Canadian exchanges. With more than 5 years of track record to back it up, Microcap Insider is the choice for the growth-minded investor. Alex contributes his thoughts and insights regularly to Energy and Capital. To learn more about Alex, click here.