A Golden Thread (Butti & Perlin)

Authors: Ken Butti and John Perlin. Publisher: Cheshire Books, Palo Alto, CA, 1980. ~289 pages. ISBN 978-0-917352-07-2.

A comprehensive history of solar energy use from ancient Greece through 1979: solar orientation in ancient Greek and Roman architecture, medieval and Renaissance solar use, 19th-century solar motors (Mouchot, Ericsson, Shuman), early 20th-century solar water heaters, the MIT solar house program (1939–1962), postwar international solar water-heater industries, and the 1970s solar revival (Village Homes in Davis, CA; parabolic-trough pumps).

The one New Mexico reference

The book’s only New Mexico passive-solar content is Bridgers & Paxton’s 1956 Albuquerque office building — described as the first solar-heated office building in the US, using active solar air heating also applied to summer cooling — plus a 1977 parabolic-trough irrigation pump in Willard, NM (25 hp engine, 700 gal/min, 404 acres irrigated).

One bridging figure the book shares with the scientific literature: Harry Tabor, credited in A Golden Thread as inventor of Israel’s selective absorber coating — the same Tabor cited by Farrington Daniels (1964, Ch. 12) on selective radiation surfaces. Tabor appears in both the mainstream scientific and industrial solar histories, but has no direct connection to Baer.

What it doesn’t cover — the archive’s key finding

Steve Baer, Zomeworks, Drop City, Harold Hay, Harry Thomason, the counterculture passive-solar movement, and Bliss’s nocturnal-radiation experiments are entirely absent. The book represents the mainstream engineering/institutional history of solar energy — universities, government programs, established industry — not the counterculture practitioner tradition this archive documents. Hay’s Atascadero house (1973) and Baer’s Cool Cell precursors were both well within the book’s chronological and geographic scope; neither appears.

Why it matters for this archive

This omission is itself load-bearing evidence in why hasn’t passive thermal scaled?: a comprehensive, 2,500-year solar history published in 1980 — the same year Baer’s Zome House was already internationally documented — simply never encountered (or chose not to include) the practitioners who’d been building working night-sky-radiative-cooling systems for over a decade. The counterculture and academic/institutional traditions ran in parallel without sufficiently cross-informing each other, a pattern the USAF Passive Solar Handbook repeats five years later.

See also

• Why hasn’t passive thermal scaled?
• USAF Passive Solar Handbook
• Harold Hay
• Farrington Daniels
• Night-sky radiative cooling
• Steve Baer
• Evolution of the thermal vision
• Atascadero Skytherm house — Hay’s 1973 demonstration, well within the book’s scope yet never mentioned
• Ray Bliss — nocturnal-radiation pioneer whose experiments the book also omits
• Index