What are the basic kinds of solar cookers?

What are the basic kinds of solar cookers?

There are three basic kinds:

	Box cookers This type of cooker has been the advantage of slow, even cooking of large quantities of food. Variations include slanting the face toward the sun and the number of reflectors. You'll find an article discussing solar box cooker designs on the Solar Cooking Archive.
	Panel cookers In this design, various flat panels concentrate the sun's rays onto a pot inside a plastic bag or under a glass bowl. The advantage of this design is that they can be built in an hour or so for next to nothing. In Kenya, these are being manufactured by Solar Cookers International for US$5 each. There are many other groups manufacturing panel cookers, expecially the CooKit.
	Parabolic cookers These are usually concave disks that focus the light onto the bottom of a pot. The advantage is that foods cook about as fast as on a conventional stove. The disadvantage is that they are complicated to make, they must be focused often to follow the sun, and they can cause burns and eye injury if not used correctly. Some of these concerns have recently been reduced by Dr. Dieter Seifert's design.

The Compendium of solar cooker designs shows many variations on these themes. You can also listen to a good good introduction to solar cooking on the Solar Cooking Archive.

Who made the first solar cooker?

The first solar cooker we know of was invented by Horace de Saussure, a Swiss naturalist experimenting as early as 1767. See this article for more info.