Our Mr. Sun
Our Mr. Sun is a 1956 one-hour American television film in Technicolor written, produced, and directed by Frank Capra.
The film starred Frank Baxter as "Dr. Research", and Eddie Albert as "the fiction writer", the other recurring character in The Bell Laboratory Science Series.
The film is notable as the last project of actor Lionel Barrymore, who provided the voice of Father Time.
Our Mr. Sun and a companion film, Hemo the Magnificent (about blood circulation), were popular favorites for showing in primary and secondary school science classrooms from the late 1950s until the early 1980s.
The film opens with Dr. Research (Dr. Frank C. Baxter) and the Fiction Writer (Eddie Albert) meeting Father Time (Lionel Barrymore) and Mr. Sun (Marvin Miller) who explain that time started a few billion years ago and that the Sun is a star.
Logic and reasoning were the beginning of the end of worshiping the Sun as algebra and the astrolabe were used to study the heavens.
Light from the next closest star, Alpha Centauri, takes more than 4 years to get to Earth at a speed greater than 186,000 miles per second.
Dr. George Ellery Hale and Dr. Henri Deslandres both developed the spectroheliograph—independently—to study the Sun in different wavelengths of light related to specific atoms.
The largest recorded prominence was captured at the High Altitude Observatory in Colorado on June 4, 1946 as it left the Sun at 400,000 miles per hour.
When solar flares erupt from sunspots they emit ultraviolet radiation, which reach the Earth in 8 minutes, and electrified fragments of atoms which take around 30 hours.
The Sun generates this energy through thermonuclear reactions roughly equal to 10,000 hydrogen bombs going off every second and has been doing so for the last 4 billion years.
Two out of every three people don't have enough to eat which is required for good health and 100 million new humans are born each year becoming a population explosion.
The food problem is being studied by Dr. Hiroshi Tamiya of the Tokugawa Biological Institute in his research on chlorella, an algae consisting of carbohydrates, fats and 50% protein.
In the end though, solar power will be the only solution on a long-term scale; otherwise society will have to go back to a muscle-powered existence as it was when humans and animals provided the energy to run things.
Based on the work of scientists Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller, and Gerald Pearson at Bell Labs, this device can turn sunlight directly into electricity.
A cartoon version of Dr. Research dressed as a pastry chef shows how the solar battery can be manufactured by "cooking-up" a wafer of silicon with a boron coating.
Eddie Albert, Frank Baxter, Marvin Miller and Lionel Barrymore are the only actors credited on-screen.
Dawn is the last of the animated characters and briefly appears at the beginning of the film where she introduces Mr. Sun to tell his story.
Production took place over a period of four years[4] and was initiated at the behest of N. W. Ayer & Son, who were AT&T's advertising agency at the time.
[6] A number of well-known scientists provided technical advice during the production of the film, which was later approved by a Scientific Advisory Board.
In 2003, the film was released, along with The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays, in DVD format by Image Entertainment.
