The recent news that a Swiss professor has developed a low-cost solar power cell using materials as common and inexpensive as dye squeezed from berries has a lot of people, once again, dreaming of a day when humans will put their big brains to work toward something genuinely useful -- like finding ways to generate cheap, clean, limitless energy using the heat and light from our very own sun. In the meantime, its worth recalling that high-tech (and relatively low-tech) gadgets for capturing and using solar energy are nothing new, and many of the ideas being batted around today are similar to equally ingenious notions floated and tinkered with for decades. Pictured: In 1958, the great American architect and designer Charles Eames holds a small solar engine -- dubbed his Do Nothing Machine -- that generates power to run the small, whirling universe of brightly colored toys surrounding him.
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