In its March issue, Fast Company magazine highlighted women inventors, and uncovered this little tidbit. While at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Solar Energy Research Project in 1948, Hungarian-born  Maria Telkes was asked by Boston sculptor, Amelia Peabody, to construct a solar-heated house on land she owned in Dover.

"I envisage the day when solar heat collecting shelters, like power stations, will be built apart from the house," Telkes told W. Clifford Harvey of The Christian Science Monitor. "One such solar-heating building could develop enough heat from the sun for pumping into an entire community of homes."

Courtesy of Fast Company magazine, March 2009.