Today, Odeillo remains the largest solar furnace in the world, and is used by the French National Scientific Research Centre for studying heat transfer fluid systems, energy converters and the behaviour of materials at high temperatures.

The company received a sample order from this customer to deliver the solar furnace in August 2011.

MOTHER'S Solar Tracking System; MOTHER'S Solar-furnace Frame; Plumbing up MOTHER'S Solar Furnace (all three from 1979)

CUTLINE: Ryan Lagoy and his brother, Ross, both of Leominster High School, explain their solar furnace project yesterday as it is displayed at the Worcester Regional Science and Engineering Fair.

The orbits of some comets suggest that they either graze the sun or die a fiery death by falling into the solar furnace. But planetary scientists have thought that asteroids weren't likely to suffer a similar fate.

Hassan Fathy, that great latter-day Morrisian, who tried to re-invent architecture appropriate for the climate of Egypt based on traditional models, accused 'the architect who builds a sort of solar furnace and then brings in a vast refrigerating plant to make it habitable [of] over-simplifying the problem and ...

The circular reflector, 1.5 metres (five feet) across, has become part of a solar furnace which converts sunlight into heat at Tohoku University s facility on the southern island of Kyushu.

Behind him is the parabolic solar furnace in his front yard.

Further refinements of the techniques designed by Winston's group are expected to yield a solar furnace design that can produce concentrations of more than 100,000 suns.

The recent field tests, on a 10-times-larger scale and with concentrated sunlight, took place in a solar furnace at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.