My unsung hero of science: William Adams, the Bombay bureaucrat whose vision of a solar future was dashed by colonial conservatism

William Adams was entranced by energy. As a young man, his interest was nursed by working as a clerk in a London patent office in the 1860s. This gave him an early look at some of the first British designs for exploiting solar energy using mirrors, water or both.

Adams would later recount his excitement at reading about the French mathematician Augustin Mouchot’s invention of the first machine ever to run on energy from the Sun. The device, which connected a solar boiler to a specifically designed steam engine, was warmly received by Napoleon III when it was presented to the emperor in 1866.

Inspired, Adams soon designed and patented his own rudimentary solar boiler. The only problem was, he needed more sun.

This series is dedicated to lesser-known, highly influential scientists who have had a powerful influence on the careers and research paths of many others, including the authors of these articles.

When offered the chance to become deputy registrar of Bombay by the Indian city’s governor, Sir Philip Edmond Wodehouse, Adams jumped at the opportunity. There, he became the first Briton to design, build and test a fully-functioning solar steam engine fit for industrial purpose.

But he also came up against the conservatism of India’s colonial rulers, who did not see this Bombay bureaucrat for the energy visionary that he undoubtedly was.

‘The rays beat like missiles’

Adams arrived in Bombay in 1873 to find it in the middle of a cotton boom, with mills popping up like mushrooms across the city. The population was growing so quickly that firewood was depleted for miles around. The landscape grew “bald as a billiard ball”, as Adams put it.

Every morning before setting off for work near Bombay’s central fort, Adams would set up his outdoor laboratory at his home in the southernmost Colaba district, near the open sea. He instructed an Indian fundhi (skilled carpenter) to build a set of three-tiered wooden shelves to hold 18 looking glasses.

“Each glass was moveable on a swivel in the same manner as an ordinary toilet glass”, Adams explained, meaning he could pivot each glass by “the touch of the finger”.

Later, for open-air experiments, Adams used two banks of mirrors (36 in total) which made “the mercury in the thermometer boil, leaping up to over 670 degrees fahrenheit”. He then placed a copper cylinder containing three gallons of water in the focus of all 36 mirrors, making it boil in exactly 20 minutes.

But Adams’s ambition did not end there. To reach sufficient pressure in the boiler to drive a steam engine, this bureaucrat-cum-engineer built a giant concave mirror, 24 feet in diameter. He then sent for his London solar boiler, which was delivered by ship to Bombay in 1876.

One fine morning, Adams – wearing dark glasses for safety – turned his giant concave mirror on the copper cylinder filled with water. “The rays beat like missiles in a continuous and incessant storm of solar fire,” he wrote.

An hour later, the cylinder registered 55 pounds of pressure per square inch. He hired a steam engine of 3 horsepower and connected it to the boiler: the pressure moved the pistons. Adams had built the first working, British-designed solar steam engine.

For a fortnight, he kept the pump going near his bungalow in Colaba – proudly and sweatily displaying his innovation to government officials, newspaper reporters, mill owners and the local Indian communities. Members of the public were invited to witness his experiments too, via a notification in a Bombay newspaper.

‘An inexhaustible source of wealth’

In 1877, Adams wrote a letter to the editor of the Times of India arguing that the application of his solar steam engine would “make India the seat of the principal manufacturing industries of the world”.

Later, in his wildly ahead-of-its-time treatise Solar Heat: A Substitute for Fuel in Tropical Countries (1878), Adams argued that countries near the equator “possess, in their clear skies, a gratuitous and inexhaustible source of wealth, equal to that which western nations have to dig, with infinite labour and toil, from the bowels of the Earth”.

Adams sketched out plans to use solar heat for everything from cotton gins (engines to separate cotton fibres from seeds) to Hindu crematoria. He called upon the colonial British government to invest in this promising substitute for coal, which was then being imported to India at great expense.

Adams envisioned solar energy transforming the Raj. Just like the coal-combusting steam engine had replaced the waterwheel in England, he argued that thermal heat could now replace fossil fuels in India. But his colonial bosses were not persuaded.

‘Too subversive’

Adams was part of a 19th-century wave of global research into solar steam engines, as I explore in my postdoctoral project and upcoming book. But in contrast to fellow pioneers including Frenchman Mouchot, Adams built his solar steam engine to stimulate local Indian industry, not to benefit the colonial government.

The locals shared Adams’s belief in this technology. One even wrote to Scientific American magazine to express their desire for the rapid adoption of solar power:

My residence is in a tropical part of India … where fuel is scarce and dear … In this part of the country (about 300 miles north of Bombay), there is a great opening for cheap power in small units.

Bombay’s new governor Sir Richard Temple concluded, however, that solar heat “could not be used for commercial purposes on a large scale”. He argued that local factory owners would not like giving “the workmen a holiday on days when the sky is not clear”.

In truth, Adams’s invention was too subversive for Britain’s colonial officials and capitalists. In less sunny climes, solar energy – tethered to the seasonal rhythms of nature – might negate their commercial ambition for timeless industrial production. But they also saw India as an important market for British coal exports.

While a few mill owners adopted Adams’s auxiliary solar heater for their steam engines, most regarded it as a primitive contraption unfit to satisfy the demands of modern civilisation.

Increasingly frustrated that neither the industrial capitalists nor the colonial government supported his vision, Adams abandoned further experiments. His dream of India switching away from coal to solar power, from combustion to concentration, would not happen for at least another century.

Now, however, India is a world leader in the global energy transition. It heads the International Solar Alliance, and is the third largest solar power generator in the world.

Which begs the question: how much further advanced would this technology be had Adams’s 19th-century solar experiments been embraced by India’s colonial rulers at the time?