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John Perlin

John Perlin is author of A Forest Journey: The Story of Wood and Civilization, which recounts how wood, the principal fuel and building material from the Bronze Age through the 19th century, played a major role in the culture, demographics, economy, internal and external politics, and technology of the great civilizations of Sumer, Assyria, Egypt, China, Knossos, Mycenae, Classical Greece and Rome, Western Europe, and North America. Harvard University Press has chosen A Forest Journey as one of the Press' "One-Hundred Great Books" of all time. After five printing runs at Harvard University Press, a second edition has recently been published by The Countryman Press. His latest work, From Space to Earth: The Story of Solar Electricity, covers the development of solar cells and their applications. Perlin was recently the principal investigator for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the National Center for Photovoltaics' gathering of exhibit and historical material for the 50th anniversary of the crystalline silicon solar cell by Bell Laboratories. Currently, along with Nobel Laureates Walter Kohn and Alan Heeger, Perlin is producing a film called Power from the Sun: A Century since Einstein's Photon/Fifty Years of Modern Photovoltaics.