IN MEMORIAM
Lynn Northrup, 98; Inventor
Was Pioneer In Solar Energy
Born March 18, 1918, Houston, Texas, Leonard L. “Lynn” Northrup, Jr, a pioneer in the solar energy business, passed away peacefully at his home, a month after he retired, three weeks after the death of his beloved wife, Mernie, and six days after his 98th birthday.
Survivors include his son, James “Chip” Northrup of Cooperstown and Dallas, Texas.
If your car has air conditioning, if your house has a high efficiency air conditioning system or a geothermal heating and cooling system, or if you have a solar thermal collector or get power from concentrating solar collectors, then you benefit from something Lynn Northrup either invented or developed. That’s why an air conditioning company jacksonville fl is available to help people who need specialized help for their AC unit. Northrup set in motion this being available.
Lynn was remarkable in his creativity, his humility and his extraordinary work ethic. From the time he was a boy, working in his grandfather’s saddle factory, until a few weeks before his death, he did what he loved best: invented products, started companies and provided good jobs to people from all walks of life, all ethnicities and all religions. As President Coolidge said, “The business of America is business.” In that regard, Lynn was a quintessential American.
He was as modest as he was successful. You could know Lynn your entire life and never know that he went to Harvard or that he served as a Captain in the United States Army in World War II. Or, for that matter, that he once played in a band conducted by John Phillip Sousa.
Lynn was a pioneer of the commercialization of solar thermal energy in the United States. Northrup’s company designed, patented, developed and manufactured some of the first commercial solar water heaters, solar concentrators, solar-powered air conditioning systems, solar power towers and photovoltaic thermal hybrid systems in the United States. The company he founded became part of ARCO Solar, which in turn became BP Solar, which became the largest solar energy company in the world. Northrup was a prolific inventor with 14 US patents.
A fourth generation Texan on his father’s side and fifth generation on his mother’s side, Lynn was the son of L. L. Northrup Sr., an inventor in his own right, and the grandson of J.D. Northrup, the inventor of the modern western saddle. His mother was Dolly McKaskle Northrup, a retail entrepreneur. He was educated at Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, Texas, and received a BA from Southern Methodist University, a MS from the University of Denver, and an Master of Business Administration from the Harvard Business School.
Northrup served as a Captain the United States Army Corps of Engineers during and shortly after World War II where he oversaw the construction of military bases and their decommissioning. One of those decommissions involved auditing a contract with Les Keliher, a Dallas based contractor. While auditing the contract, Lynn had a blind date with Keliher’s daughter, Hilda Jane Keliher. When he went to pick Jane up, he hoped that Keliher would not recognize him as one of the Army auditors. Keliher pretended not to. Lynn married Jane Keliher in 1947.
After the arrival of daughter Susan in 1948 and son James Lynn “Chip” in 1949, Lynn and Jane built a modern house, which Lynn designed in its entirety, with one of the first residential central air conditioning systems in the United States.
Lynn’s first patent, granted in 1951, was co-authored with his father-in-law, Les Keliher, was a new a way to clean engine parts and was manufactured by the Storm Vulcan Company. Simultaneously, with the DeSanders brothers, he fitted Cadillacs with air conditioning equipment, putting the machinery in the trunk and piping the cooled air through tubes in the headliner. This caught the interest of General Motors engineers, who copied Northrup’s system in the late 1940’s as a factory option.
By the mid-1970s, Northrup became interested in boosting the efficiency of air conditioning systems, and began looking at novel approaches, including water-source geothermal heat pumps, and the innovative use of scroll compressors in central air conditioning systems to achieve a higher efficiency rating, which have since become the standard for high-efficiency residential air conditioning systems.
In the early 1970s, before the Arab Oil Embargo and the spike in oil prices, Northrup became interested in the commercialization of solar thermal systems, particularly for heating potable water and swimming pools. Such systems had already been commercialized in other countries where climatic conditions were favorable, and energy costs were high, notably in Israel.
Northrup began experimenting with solar collectors to heat air, using finned heat exchangers. This work lead to the commercialization of flat panel solar water heaters, and solar pool heaters, marketed as Northrup Energy products directly and via dealers, with particular success in Hawaii, where solar thermal systems could be used without antifreeze. These were first mass produced solar water heaters made in America.
Northrup’s break-through technology was a collector that used a long curved acrylic fresnel lens to concentrate or focus sunlight at a theoretical ratio of approximately 12 to 1 onto a linear flat copper tube.
These arrays proved popular – and were used to drive absorption refrigeration equipment on large commercial installations at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, at Frenchman’s Reef Hotel in St Thomas, USVI, residences, and were sold to prominent individuals, including movie actor and entrepreneur Steve McQueen, actor Stuart Whitman and environmentalist Robert Redford.
The early success of these concentrating collectors was due in part to grants from the Department of Energy and its predecessor the Energy Research and Development Administration. They created a good deal of publicity for Northrup, Inc., including the cover of Popular Science Magazine and an article in Fortune Magazine that noted, “By squeezing (sic) sunshine optically, Lynn Northrup’s unique new rooftop solar collector produces higher temperatures than are obtainable from most solar heating systems now on the market”.
The fundamentals of these systems are still in use in tracking parabolic solar collectors.
Northrup, Inc. was soon an industry leader in pre-commercial and commercial power tower and heliostat installations, securing grants from NASA Huntsville, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, the United States Department of Energy, and the Energy Research and Development Administration. Most of the heliostats, including the Northrup II, a commercial model, were developed under contract for the United States Department of Energy.
By the late 1970s, just five years after testing the first low temperature solar thermal collectors, Northrup Energy had become the preeminent developer of solar thermal technology. This attracted the attention of investors, and suitors, including the Atlantic Richfield Company, “ARCO.” ARCO’s Chairman, Robert O Anderson was personally interested in solar technology and visited the Northrup Energy facility. Northrup, Inc. merged with Atlantic Richfield, and ARCO Ventures changed its name to ARCO Solar.
The Northrup Energy team under Floyd Blake and Jerry Anderson went on to design and build some of the first commercial solar power tower installations, notably “Solar One” near Barstow, California. The seven million watt installation near Barstow was later dismantled and shipped to Europe as the largest solar electric power generation facility in the world.
ARCO Solar increasingly concentrated on the development of solar photovoltaic systems and was subsequently sold first to Seimens, then to British Petroleum (now “BP”), where BP Solar became the largest solar photovoltaic company in the world.
After the merger of Northrup, Inc. into ARCO, Northrup became engaged in real estate development, including the assembly of one of the largest tracts of land in downtown Dallas, where he entered into a joint venture with James Rouse‘s Enterprise Development Company to build a festival marketplace. This project was sold to a Belgian investment group who failed to pursue the project with Rouse.
Northrup subsequently started American Limestone, an innovator in using surface quarried Texas limestone in building facades, using Lynn’s patented panels of limestone as a veneer, attached to a metal grid without mortar. This popularized the use of surface cut limestone as a veneer in residential, municipal and commercial applications.
At the other extreme in size, Northrup utilized massive blocks of limestone for the Cistercian Chapel in Irving, Texas. The architect, Gary Cunningham, said “We wanted to build a church that would literally last for the next 900 years.”
In addition to his business endeavors, Northrup was an avid sailor and rancher who served on the Board of Directors of Trinity University and donated land to the city of Boerne, Texas as their largest municipal park. Lynn’s last US patent was granted in 2006, when he was 88, for an evaporative desalination system.
In addition to his son Chip and his wife, Nancy, Mr. Northrup is preceded by his second wife, Merlyn Myers Northrup and his first wife, Hilda Jane Keliher Northrup. He is survived by his sister Elaine Loyd of Dallas, daughter Susan Eldredge and husband “Linc” of Dallas, his son James L. “Chip” Northrup and wife Nancy of Dallas, Tommy Overton of Dallas, and Nancy Benzmiller of Colorado Springs, and grand children, Ben Eldredge of Boerne, Texas, Rebecca Eldredge of Dallas, Emily Torres of Tucson, J.D. Northrup of Berkeley, Kate Summers of Boerne, Texas, Robert Northrup of Dallas, Natalie Northrup of Minneapolis, Hannah Benzmiller, and Austin, Elli, Lily and Judson Overton. His great-grandchildren are Olivia Eldredge, and Brooke and Lauren Summers.
Donations can be made in honor of Mr. Northrup’s memory to a charity of your choice. A memorial service is planned at First United Methodist Church, Dallas, TX on Saturday, April 2nd.