Below is an amazing scene from an amazing movie, You Cant Take it With You. About half way through to film, Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur sit down on a park bench and have a five minute conversation that covers the meaning of life, the politics of fear, the future of solar power and falling in love. It's five minutes long and has no cuts, just Jimmy and Jean acting their hearts out. The longest piece of the scene is the bit about solar power. 

It was 1938, and Jimmy's character, Tony Kirby, had been forced to decided between his utopian research and joining in his families bank. This scene says a lot of things, but it's worth watching just for the little bit about solar power, quoted below. 

"We wanted to find out what made the grass grow green.  Now that sounds silly and everything, but it's the biggest research problem in the world today and I'll tell you why.  Because there's a tiny little engine in the green of this grass, and in the green of the trees, that has the mysterious gift of being able to take energy from the rays of the sun and store it up.  You see, that's how the heat and power of coal and oil and wood is stored up.

 

"Well, we thought if we could find the secret of all those millions of little engines in this green stuff, we could make big ones.  And then we could take all the power we'd ever need right from the sun's rays."

A quick look at the work being done with porphyrins shows us that there's still a lot of work to be done. But, Tony Kirby, your work continues!