“Most people do not have any idea that we were using solar in the 1880s,” filmmaker Amanda Pollak said during a TCA press conference for the new American Experience documentary film “The Sun Queen,” premiering Tuesday, April 4th, at 9/8c on PBS. The film chronicles the life and work of Dr. Mária Telkes who created the first solar-powered home in the mid-century. “When you look at some of the photographs from the 1920s of solar panels on houses, and there were these solar hot water heaters everywhere, it’s really shocking, and what it makes you realize is that there was a whole era in which everybody understood that we are living in a fragile state with our environment and that we need to think about different ways of fueling our lives. Especially following the Industrial Revolution, there was a real need to figure out how are we going to power this growing society. And then somehow that just went poof, and we forgot for a while, and now we’re back thinking about these things. But I hope that it is really kind of revelatory to understand that we’ve been here before.”
(Rahoul Ghose/PBS)
“One of the things that we do, that’s my favorite part of the job, is develop ideas that we hope can grow into full-fledged films,” shared American Experience senior executive producer about discovering Dr. Mária Telkes’ story and giving it the green light to become a documentary. “We read an article that had a short mention of Mária Telkes somewhere and reached out to Amanda and Gene Tempest, her producer, because they have a very long and illustrious track record with American Experience. And we thought that they might be as excited about this idea as us. We had the kernel of the idea and then passed the baton right over to Amanda and her team. And I must say, while we were convinced that this could be an amazing film and we knew it was a great story and had all of the drama and the peaks and all the things that we would want, the footage that Amanda and her team were able to find is incredible. I mean, the film brings Mária Telkes, this woman that none of us had heard of, to life in a way that is just incredible. And so, I think that even though we had Telkes levels of faith that the story would work, they really took it to a whole different level.”
The big challenge in bringing the story of Dr. Mária Telkes forward was the lack of information written on her.“Mostly what I do is women’s history and forgotten women, the women that nobody’s heard of, and doing the contextualization of these women who did incredible things that you should know about, and how do we find them, and how do we dig out these stories,” added Olivia Meikle, a gender studies scholar and host of the podcast What’s Her Name. “I’m a trained researcher, and I know how to find things, but most of my interest is in figuring out how to tell stores that don’t exist. How do you come from nothing when there’s eighteen pages about this woman? How do you do justice to that? And some of its research, and some of it is figuring out where the access points are in the rest of the history. A running joke on our podcast with my sister is that our favorite style of episodes is we know for sure that she existed, and that’s all we know for sure. But the challenge of doing that, of how do you find the story through connecting to other stories, to finding letters that are talking about these things, stuff like that, that’s my favorite. And digging around in the weeds of those no one has ever heard of this person before, and how do we turn them into a full person? I came on board with that kind of a skillset of how do you find the stuff, and how do you figure out how to tell a story that there is not enough to tell. Luckily, with her, once you start digging, there was a lot.”
“To be handed a story that is not something that we all know, it was somebody I had never heard of, is a little bit terrifying but also creates this incredible research challenge,” recalled Amanda Pollak, who directed and produced the film. “To find people who could talk about her was one challenge, because there is not a definitive book about Mária Telkes that you can speak to the biographer, and then to find the materials. MIT had a really good archive. The University of Delaware, which is where she was towards the end of her life, has an amazing archive. Library of Congress had materials. So it was scattered around, but it was a real excavation to figure out how are we going to tell this story and how are we going to bring her to life?”
As the title suggests, one of the ways she was brought to life is through a nickname the media gave her, one that she took and ran with in order to try and help promote the research she was doing for the good of mankind. “A lot of women who are in any field that is male-dominated or even male adjacent or that you’re not supposed to be doing will recognize that feeling,” Olivia Meikle commented. “It’s pedestalizing, ‘Oh, the Sun Queen,’ but there is that element of, ‘Oh, isn’t it cute? She’s doing science.’ And you can fight that, but it’s usually a losing battle, and so sometimes it’s just fine to go, ‘Okay, sure. If the fact that you think I’m cute means that you’ll pay attention to my work then I’ll use that, and I’ll run with that,/ because there’s no way to undo that at this point. She definitely was aware of that, and whatever gets attention to the work, that’s what we’ll do.”
“She really was like a celebrity, a scientist celebrity of her time,” concluded Cameo George. “There’s a headline, ‘Lady scientist harnesses the sun.’ Where it’s just like ‘Lady scientist,’ what are you talking about? And there was nothing sarcastic, humorous about it. That was the language of the day, and so I do feel like calling it ‘The Sun Queen’ and sort of reclaiming that title that people gave to her that we might consider not PC or pejorative or sort of snarky or weird, there was something about that, taking it back, that was kind of fun for this film. And she reveled in the attention and the title, and to some extent, she’s like it doesn’t matter if calling me The Sun Queen makes you more interested in solar.”
With her name and credits towards the advancement of solar energy restored, Dr. Mária Telkes is ready to take a seat on the throne she deserves for her life of scientific discovery. See “The Sun Queen,” part of American Experience, on Tuesday, April 4th, at 9/8c on PBS.