American solar pioneer and inventor of the "Solaris" solar heating system. Presented "Solar Space Heating, Water Heating, Cooling in the Thomason Home" at the 1961 United Nations Conference on New Sources of Energy, Rome (documented in Daniels, Direct Use of the Sun's Energy, 1964, footnote 174 in Ch. 9) — placing him in the same scientific literature as Harold Hay, Bliss, and Yanagimachi. Built at least three solar houses — Baer documented the cost at $1–2 per square foot — at a time when industry claimed solar was impractical.
Baer documented Thomason's exclusion from the 1973 NSF solar meeting in Washington DC (Sunspots, Ch. 11): while Alcoa and Texas Instruments sat at the table, Thomason was "kept in the audience." The contrast sharpened Baer's argument against government-funded solar as a vehicle for industry capture.
Harold Hay grouped Thomason with Baer as "creative activists" — people who "took their own time and money and worked with their own hands to develop solar energy systems that work." All three were working independently in the late 1960s and early 1970s before DOE and NSF became dominant in solar funding.