Solar power may seem like a modern energy alternative, but a former La Crosse man was actually a pioneer in the field during the early 1900s.

His name was Henry E. Willsie, and he moved to La Crosse in 1876 at age 8 with his parents, Henry and Charlotte Willsie. The family had been living in Iowa.
The elder Willsie was a well-known contractor and roofer in the city. According to an advertisement in the 1900 La Crosse City Directory, he constructed asphalt and concrete sidewalks, and also did roofing work, especially with gravel and tin roofs.

The younger Henry Willsie was listed as a clerk at the high school in the 1888 City Directory and a patent attorney in the 1895 City Directory. In between those years, he was attending the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

By the early 1900s, Henry Jr. had left La Crosse and was experimenting with solar energy out West, especially the concept of storing the energy so it could be used at night. Willsie wanted to use solar energy to power engines that would be used to pump water and irrigate desert areas.

He developed a method of using flat-plate collectors that heated hundreds of gallons of water, and then kept the water warm at night by storing it in an insulated basin. Willsie then ran tubes into the heated water, and sent sulfur dioxide through the tubes, transforming it into a high-pressure vapor, which operated the engine. Essentially, Willsie became the first to harness solar energy for use when the sun wasn’t out.

Willsie built two small power plants using his method; one in St. Louis and the other in Needles, Calif. He offered up his solar-powered engines for sale, the largest of which was 15-horsepower, but found no interested buyers. Potential customers apparently felt that his machinery was too fragile and the ratio of the size of Willsie’s apparatus compared to its power output was too high.

Unfortunately, little is known about what happened to Willsie and his experiments after his initial venture failed to attract investors. Willsie did invent a gas mask that was selected by the U.S. Army for troops serving in World War I, but the armistice was signed before the gas masks became regular issue.

Willsie and his wife, Honore, divorced in 1922. Honore later married publisher William Morrow, and under the name Honore Willsie Morrow, became a fairly well-known author. She was an acknowledged expert on Abraham Lincoln.

She published her first novel in 1913. In 1919, she published a novel called “The Forbidden Trail” which told the story of a man who invented a solar energy device to irrigate and develop the desert southwest. Hmmm, we wonder where she got that idea from.