Padre Himalaya, the priest who took a solar furnace to St Louis

In the autumn of 1904, behind the Palace of Forestry, Fish and Game at the St Louis World's Fair, a steel frame 42 feet high and painted bright blue held a great tilted dish lined with little squares of looking glass. Visitors pressed against the wire fence around it. Some asked whether it was an airship, a “ducking machine” or a contraption for drying clothes.1 source1 source

Its builder was a young, bearded Portuguese priest who called himself M. A. G. Himalaya. He and his workmen had spent more than five months putting it up. On 18 October he turned it to the sun for the first time. The day was foggy, but iron melted at the focus. The Times said magnesia crucibles melted too; a syndicated report said the magnesia was about to fuse when the sun went in and the trial was put off.2 sources2 sources

Smoke rose from the little furnace and the glare from the mirrors drew crowds. The New York Times gave him a long Sunday feature, headlined “Pyrheliophor, wonder of St. Louis Fair”, and reported, without saying who had measured it, that more than 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit had been generated. The inventor was more careful about money than about temperatures. He told the paper he had turned down capitalists who wanted to form a company.1 source1 source

Manuel António Gomes was born on 9 December 1868 at Cendufe, a hill parish of Arcos de Valdevez in the Minho, in Portugal's far north-west. His parents farmed, and as a boy he worked the land and herded cattle.3 sources3 sources

At 14 he entered the seminary in Braga, where he read widely in science. He was very tall, so his classmates called him Himalaya. He kept the nickname for life and later used it as a surname. He was ordained a priest at about 22: in 1890 according to one account, in 1891 according to his biographer, Jacinto Rodrigues.3 sources3 sources

He became chaplain of an orphans' college in Coimbra and then a teacher. For years he taught natural science, physics and chemistry, in Coimbra and latterly in Porto. The farm boy never lost his interest in fertiliser and worn-out soil, and his admirers trace the solar machine back to that search for a way to make land more fertile.5 sources5 sources

While he was chaplain at the Visitation College in Porto, a Brazilian woman of Portuguese descent, Emília dos Santos, who studied natural science at the Sorbonne, took an interest in his ideas and paid for his first machine. In 1899, with the blessing of his superiors, he left for Paris. By 1904, the Times reported, the Archbishop of Braga had freed him from clerical duties so that he could give his life to science.2 sources2 sources

In Paris he attended lectures by the chemist Marcellin Berthelot and others, and worked on the geometry of an apparatus to gather sunlight to a point. In 1899 the French government granted him a patent for it. In 1900 he built a second machine and tested it high in the eastern Pyrenees, reaching, by his account, 1,100°C.1 source1 source

The site was on the slopes above the village of Sorède, not far from the ruined Château d'Ultrera. Equipment went up by mule, and he built a dish 7 metres across. Its circular rail can still be seen.1 source1 source

On 30 August 1901 he applied for a United States patent for a “solar apparatus for producing high temperatures”: a truncated paraboloid of mirrors that could be turned to follow the sun and throw its light into a furnace or crucible standing outside the mirror. It was meant for metallurgical and chemical research at temperatures beyond those of ordinary furnaces, including the electric furnace.1 source1 source

Back in Portugal in 1902 he built a third machine in Lisbon. With it, he reported, he reached 2,000°C and melted a large block of basalt. Scientific American, which gave the same figure, noted that the Lisbon apparatus was much smaller than the one he built next.2 sources2 sources

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which opened in St Louis on 30 April 1904, commemorated the United States' acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from France. By May Himalaya had arrived. The Iron Age announced that a Portuguese priest had come with an invention to melt anything by the sun's rays, and had been granted space outside the Palace of Liberal Arts. The fair's guides described a 30-ton apparatus on a plot of 100 by 60 feet, and the official one added: “It is claimed that the machine will melt anything.”3 sources3 sources

The official guide said the project would go up under the auspices of the Portuguese commission, and the official catalogue listed his “solar apparatus” in Portugal's section, among instruments of precision and scientific apparatus. Later Portuguese accounts say the official delegation was reluctant to back it, and that he got permission directly from the fair's management.3 sources3 sources

The Times called the sun machine practically Portugal's contribution to the fair, though the same catalogue lists Portuguese photographs, books and atlases in the exhibition palaces. The Portuguese minister in Washington, the Viscount of Alte, attended the experiments.2 sources2 sources

Building it was costly. The money came, the Times said, from a rich woman of the Portuguese royal court and a philanthropist in Paris, and a fair guide noted that “Pinto Leite of Lisbon” had come with the inventor. The Lisbon government gave what one later account calls only “moral support”. An officer of the Portuguese Royal Artillery, Captain Francis Xavier de Brito as the Times called him, took five months' leave to adjust the mirrors.3 sources3 sources

The mirror was not one piece of glass. Thousands of small flat squares were screwed to steel slats, each angled so that its reflection landed on the same small spot. A crucible about the size of a barrel sat at the focus, lined with magnesia because, the Times said, the graphite lining of his Paris machine had given way at 2,000°C.2 sources2 sources

Himalaya wanted winter sun, when the air was dry. In his view the machine could one day raise steam and drive engines in places such as Arabia or California, where the sun shone all year, but in cloudier St Louis he meant to use it for science only. The Times reported that birds flying 40 feet above the mirror were killed by the reflected heat.1 source1 source

In March 1905 the Times reported that the international jury had given the pyrheliophor the grand prize, two gold medals and a silver medal, and that no other invention in its group, physical and astronomical instruments, was so honoured. The Lisbon magazine O Occidente reported a grand prix in 1906, and Portuguese historians repeat it.3 sources3 sources

Lisboeta could not find the award in the fair's official records available online. A multi-volume history of the fair, edited by J. W. Buel, praised the machine in its chapter on Catholic exhibitors and listed the grand prize won there by the Manila Observatory, but it mentions no award for Himalaya.1 source1 source

The temperatures are harder to take on trust. In late October, Scientific American recorded his view that 3,500°C, the boiling point of carbon as measured by the French physicist Jules Violle, was the highest temperature on record, and that he expected to beat it. Buel's chapter claimed over 6,000°F, and 6,800°F “registered” on clear days. The Times claimed more than 7,000°F in November and 6,800°F in March.4 sources4 sources

His theories also ran ahead of his evidence. In St Louis he announced that the sun's heat was of electric origin. After the fair he told the Times that concentrated moonlight felt warmer on the skin than a thermometer showed, and that a sick person's thermometer could be pushed up by an abnormal flow of “vital fluid”.2 sources2 sources

The pyrheliophor had cost $4,000 to put up, the Times reported in March 1905, and moving it would cost as much again, so it was left standing on its hill in St Louis. Speaking little English, Himalaya had been largely overlooked by the fair's scientific congress. On the advice of Dr Woodward of the Carnegie Institution he moved to Washington to write a book.1 source1 source

No investor took up the sun machine, and he turned to explosives. His “process of making smokeless powder”, filed in February 1906 and granted in May 1907, worked fine potassium chlorate into starch grains without breaking them and added a drying oil. He called the powder himalayite.3 sources3 sources

He claimed it was cheap, safe to handle and free of corrosive fumes. Back in Portugal in 1906, he repeated his tests near Sintra before King Carlos and the minister of war. A military review, cited by a German explosives journal, reported trials in 15 cm and 7.5 cm shells in which it was said to fragment better than melinite, a standard military explosive.3 sources3 sources

The same journal was less impressed by the Lisbon press, which reported that he had turned down several million dollars in America so that Portugal could have the honour of making the powder.1 source1 source

A company began making himalayite in 1911. It was not used as a weapon in Portugal but in mining, forestry and other work, including tree-planting campaigns in which it blasted the holes for saplings. His other inventions included a direct engine and a turbine, a food flour made from crustaceans and bran, and a scheme to turn sewage into fertiliser.1 source1 source

He also tried to make rain with cannon fire and designed turbines for tidal power and windmills. He urged that Portugal's many rivers be harnessed for hydroelectric power, and wrote about agriculture, irrigation and the economy. In 1908 he spoke on the country's economic, agricultural and commercial crisis at a congress of the Catholic Partido Nacionalista in Viseu.4 sources4 sources

His later life is less well documented, partly because many of his letters and papers were burned by a relative who did not know what they were. He lived for long spells abroad, in the United States and Argentina among other places, still chasing backers. He stayed a priest, though he criticised compulsory celibacy and fasting in letters to his brother Gaspar.2 sources2 sources

He died in Viana do Castelo on 21 December 1933, aged 65, with his housekeeper Rosa Cerqueira beside him. According to Lemos, he fell ill after testing one of his own remedies. Few people came to the funeral, and the Porto daily O Primeiro de Janeiro remarked on the absence of Catholic notables.3 sources3 sources

For decades he was a footnote. His revival owes most to Jacinto Rodrigues, an emeritus professor of the University of Porto who taught in its architecture faculty, whose biography A Conspiração Solar do Padre Himalaya appeared in 1999. A documentary, A Utopia do Padre Himalaya, followed in 2004, and for the centenary of the St Louis award the science agency Ciência Viva named a solar competition after him.4 sources4 sources

In Sorède, an association of his admirers founded in 2005 rebuilt his 1900 furnace from photographs, and in 2013 the village put up a sundial in a square named Place Padre Himalaya. Rodrigues's research page records the association calibrating the replica's mirrors in November 2015. In August 2013 his home municipality, Arcos de Valdevez, unveiled a monument to him by the sculptor José Rodrigues, the biographer's brother.2 sources2 sources

He is often called Portugal's pioneer of renewable energy, and the country now gets most of its electricity from renewable sources. In 2024, according to the renewable energy association APREN, solar panels produced a record 4,898 GWh, 10.7% of the electricity generated in mainland Portugal, and renewables met 71.5% of consumption; the grid operator REN put that share at 71%.3 sources3 sources

The link is looser than it looks. His mirror furnace was built to make heat for chemistry and metallurgy. Today's solar panels turn light straight into electricity, something he only speculated about in St Louis in 1904.2 sources2 sources

What can be said with confidence is narrower than the legend. He built a solar concentrator with four times the mirror area of Mouchot's 1878 engine, ran it in public and won praise for it, and by the Times's account a grand prize and medals. The record temperatures, and the theories he drew from them, rest on his own word.5 sources5 sources