Dishing on a Dish

Every item in Bill Panagos’ office has a story. And after 43 years in intellectual property, including with the Army TACOM, BASF, Lear and 

S.C. Johnson, Panagos has acquired several. Among the most interesting is a mirrored dish in the conference center at Panagos Kennedy in Troy.

“It’s an icebreaker I use to talk to inventors about why their cutting-edge stuff might not be tomorrow,” he says. “It puts a humility to the entire thing.”

Many have guessed it’s a Vulcan neural neutralizer from Star Trek, but in fact it’s a solar collector that converts sunlight into mechanical energy. He got it from one of the chief engineers at Detroit Diesel, where Panagos once served as patent counsel.

“Back in the late ’40s or early ’50s, they thought this was going to be big, providing power generation to the Third World and alleviating the world’s energy problems,” he says. “It collects sunlight in the parabolic mirror, which concentrates the solar energy and directs it to the special alloy iron rod in the center. This heats the iron rod which in turn heats the air in the cylinder and causes the piston in the Stirling engine to reciprocate. This reciprocal action drives the wheel and completes the transition from solar energy to mechanical energy.”

This model can generate about 0.25 horsepower—enough to power a household fan. “This was a new and promising answer to energy shortages that were suffered in poorer regions of the world. But in the attempts to commercialize and scale this technology, other innovations overtook this one,” he says, particularly photovoltaic or solar cells. “[It] shows the creative destruction that is endemic to all innovation.”

Panagos doesn’t do it to cast a pall over the conversation, but to show the importance of incremental breakthroughs. “It drives the progress of the useful arts and sciences as called for in the U.S. Constitution,” he says. “The entire world benefits from this process.”