Let It Shine (eBook)

Unprecedented gas prices, heat waves and droughts, climate change, Solyndra — all make “alternative” sources of energy contemporary areas of activism, controversy, lobbying, and legislation. Yet few know that the ancient Chinese, Greeks, and Romans used solar energy in their architecture; that Galileo and da Vinci both planned uses for the power of the sun; and that by 1918, there were more than 4,000 solar water heaters in California. The history of solar architecture and energy technologies gives readers an epiphany-producing sense of its future. Detailing a realistic alternative to fossil fuels, in illustrations the New York Times called “especially fine” and prose Library Journal termed “highly readable,” Let It Shine shows that there is nothing — and plenty — new under the sun.

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Even as concern over climate change and energy security fuel a boom in solar technology, many still think of solar as a twentieth-century wonder. Few realize that the first photovoltaic array appeared on a New York City rooftop in 1884, or that brilliant engineers in France were using solar power in the 1860s to run steam engines, or that in 1901 an ostrich farmer in Southern California used a single solar engine to irrigate three hundred acres of citrus trees. Fewer still know that Leonardo da Vinci planned to make his fortune by building half-mile-long mirrors to heat water, or that the Bronze Age Chinese used hand-sized solar-concentrating mirrors to light fires the way we use matches and lighters today.With thirteen new chapters, Let It Shine is a fully revised and expanded edition of A Golden Thread, Perlins classic history of solar technology, detailing the past forty years of technological developments driving todays solar renaissance. This unique and compelling compendium of humankinds solar ideas tells the fascinating story of how our predecessors throughout time, again and again, have applied the sun to better their lives and how we can too.