Chemist and solar energy scientist at the University of Wisconsin (Solar Energy Laboratory, Engineering Experiment Station). Author of Direct Use of the Sun's Energy (Yale University Press, 1964) — the canonical pre-oil-crisis survey of solar energy science, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation over nine years.
Daniels represents the scientific establishment's approach to solar energy: institution-funded, laboratory-based, empirical, international in scope. His book surveys all known methods of solar energy use, from cooking to cooling to photovoltaic conversion.
Chapter 8.4 — Water Ponds (p. 104): Tabor's salt-gradient ponds (Dead Sea brine) for heat storage and power generation — these are heating ponds, not Hay's cooling roof ponds. The concept of water-as-thermal-mass is shared; the application is different.
Chapter 12 — Selective Radiation Surfaces: Surface physics of high solar absorptivity + low infrared emissivity — the physics behind both unglazed solar collector efficiency and nocturnal radiative cooling.
Chapter 13 — Cooling and Refrigeration (§13.3): The most important section for the archive. Daniels documents that nocturnal radiation cooling yields 10–35 BTU/ft²/hr (2.9–10.3 W/ft²). Bliss in Arizona used a 280 ft² black cloth radiator to store 120,000 BTU of "cold" in a 10-ton rock bed — 2 tons of refrigeration — in 1961, six years before Hay's Phoenix prototype and decades before Baer's Cool Cell. Also: the chapter notes that solar collectors for heating should be "uncovered when used for cooling by nocturnal radiation" — the di-thermal surface concept.
The 1958 Yanagimachi reference (cited in Ch. 9 footnotes) proposes combining solar + nocturnal radiation cooling + radiant panel + heat pump as a year-round air-conditioning system — the conceptual ancestor of the Cool Cell, articulated 44 years before the Cool Cell brochure.
Harry Thomason appears in the 1961 UN Conference references (Ch. 9 footnote 174) — placing him in the same scientific literature that Daniels surveyed.
Unit correspondence: Daniels' "10–35 BTU/ft²/hr" = 2.9–10.3 W/ft², directly matching Baer's experimental finding of "night radiation exceeds 9.5 W/ft²" (heated-vs-unheated-plates, 2002). The same physics, confirmed across 38 years.
The book's preface is dated January 1964 — concurrent with Holly Baer's first rhombus-icoso-dodecahedron model (December 1964). The elib markdown is searchable at ~/Projects/elib-direct-use-of-the-suns-energy/output/markdown/ (3,821 lines).