Here Comes the Sun

Many of the pavilions at Expo 2025 look like they belong in a remake of “Blade Runner,” with designs and devices straight out of science fiction. Because science and technology ahead of the curve has always been baked into world expos.

Just 19 years after the first oil well was drilled, Augustin Mouchot blazed forth with the world’s largest parabolic solar collector at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Shaped mirrors concentrated the sun’s rays onto a black copper container filled with water, which turned the H20 into steam, which then powered a refrigeration unit that produced blocks of ice. Mouchot won the gold medal for his invention, but soon after, solar power was snuffed by the falling prices of coal and oil, along with the expanding system of trains that made the fossil fuels cheap to buy and fast to transport.