Let It Shine: 6,000 Years of Solar Energy

When researching my book Power Up, I delved back into my own personal experiences and memories, interviewed other energy sector experts, visited energy infrastructure and did A LOT of reading. I was always on the lookout for in-depth books about specific areas of the energy sector to draw on, to add colour and fill in the picture of our full energy systems. Growing up in the sunny Middle East, I loved writing my third chapter – all about energy from the sun. In the research phase for this chapter, I hit the jackpot when I found John Perlin’s Let It Shine: The 6,000-Year Story of Solar Energy. It is filled with vivid, rich history and addictive twists that kept me turning the pages until the very end.

I recently contacted John, who answered some of my questions about Let It Shine.

Yasmin: What are you up to at the moment?
John: I am currently focussed on getting my two books – Let It Shine and A Forest Journey – better known to the outside world, and have just finished a manuscript on Eunice Foote, the woman who discovered global warming in 1856, and looking for a publisher.

Yasmin: Why did you write Let It Shine? How did the idea for the book come about?
John: The idea for the book began many years ago when I met some retired people at a solar conference in Los Angeles, USA. They told me that their grandparents had solar water heaters in southern California. I then asked a retired architect in Santa Barbara, California about their stories – he replied that not only had a major solar industry existed in the southern part of the state, but he remembered reading at graduate school that the Romans used the heat of the sun to warm their baths over the entire year.

I headed to the Classics department at the University of California, Santa Barbara to ask the professors if they knew of any sources describing uses of solar energy in antiquity. There, I learned that not only had the Romans used solar for bath heating, but much earlier the ancient Greeks designed whole cities so each house could use solar energy in winter to heat their homes and avoid that heat during the warmer time of the year. Off to the library I went to begin my research. And so began the first and only complete history of solar, from solar water heating and architecture to photovoltaics, which became Let It Shine.

Yasmin: Let It Shine is extremely thorough, how did you research such a huge span of the history of solar energy?
John: When I first began my history of solar energy project, people mocked that the resulting book would be very thin. As it turned out, Let It Shine is 451 pages long!

To cover 6,000 years of solar use throughout the world, I had to learn the words "solar" and "sun" in multiple languages and then go to lexicons: reference guides containing an alphabetical list of words in a certain language, referenced to sources where they are used over a certain time period. I then found people proficient in these languages – ancient Greek, Latin and Chinese – to translate the applicable literature I had found, and they guided me to other sources as well.

Other times I would look for the experts in a certain field as my guidance. For example, for the photovoltaic (PV) chapters I got to know the pioneers of the PV industry who helped me find my way. I learned, for instance, that the first practical solar cell came out of research done at Bell Telephone Laboratories. I met with the descendants of the discoverers who provided me with their bequeathed lab notes. I also went to technology museums throughout the world to look at the work of people like Sir Isaac Newton, who designed the world's most powerful solar focusing mirror of his day. It took decades to do the book, but I hope readers will appreciate the effort.

Yasmin: Where can readers find out more about you and your work?
John: For copies of Let It Shine, there are two options: Amazon, or signed copies directly from me. Those interested in getting signed copies should contact me at [email protected]. To find out more about my other work, I am also on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-perlin-3b162b17/.

One of John’s finds at the Institution of Engineering and Technology archives in London, UK – the first photovoltaic panel, which led to a new form of energy: light.