
Chapter 6
Bringing the Oil Industry into the Picture
Karl Wolfgang B
¨
oer
University of Delaware, Newark DE 19736, USA
When I received from my parents books as a young teenager, they
were usually about nature, science, and technology. One of them
caught my attention, “Du und die Natur”, and it had a chapter about
solar energy. It stayed with me for decades to come. It became
clear to me that in order to harvest the sun’s energy, one needs
to understand much more about how sunlight can be changed
into “something useful,” beyond just heating. I had early in my
teenage years my own chemistry and electronics laboratory, and I
experimented a lot. There were