ABSTRACT
If the sun’s bounty were meted out on the basis of the interest, even fascination, that it awakens here below, Great Britain would surely enjoy a surfeit. During our travels, we found few places outside the United States where solar energy has become the concern of so wide a sample of a national society, especially when one considers how much of it is actually available in the latitudes of the British Isles in winter-time. Universities and poly technics from Edinburgh to Brighton, academics and engineers, architects and town planners, large industrial concerns and one-man businesses are involved in its study or use despite-or perhaps because o f-governmental encouragement only a fraction of that given the French and West Germans, to say nothing of the Americans. There was something almost dreamlike about the entire picture, all the more so when viewed through the clouds, chills and showers of a wintry July apparently bent on reminding the British that their long, hot dry summer of 1976 could be expected about once every five centuries.
