subject: Cheap Solar Panels - Historical Advances In Producing Electricity From The Sun [print this page] When politicians start talking regarding renewable energy, you know we have problems. Solar energy is a significant renewable energy and here is an overview of how the technology has developed.
Historical Advancements in Generating Electricity From the Sun
Solar electricity is simply energy produced by harnessing the sun. It arrives in many forms including electricity production through panels, home heating via passive systems and mobile packets for powering devices such as laptops and RVs to mention just a few platforms.
Historically, sunlight has been utilized by mankind to generate heat ever since we first constructed structures. Without electricity, mankind shortly learned to orient structures to capture the heat of the sun throughout the day and keep it in ceramic or mud materials much like a blacktop parking lot will radiate heat after the sun has gone down. Early Greek structures display a specific usage of this solar strategy as do Egyptian structures.
The generation of electricity with the use of sunlight is a a lot more current phenomena. In 1901, Nicolas Tesla was the first person to receive a patent related to solar electricity, but he named it radiant heating. He searched for a patent for a machine to capture the radiant heat, but nothing much came of the invention.
In 1904, some unknown physicist known as Albert Einstein published a paper on the potential electricity production from sunlight. In 1913, William Coblentz acquired the first patent for a solar cell, but he could never make it work. In 1916, Robert Millikan was the first to generate electricity with the cell. For the next 40 years or so, nobody made much progress simply because the cells had been highly inefficient at converting sunlight to energy.
In the 1950s, Bell Labs got involved with NASA. Bell was charged with discovering a solar platform to power spacecraft as soon as they were in orbit. The solar industry would by no means be the same.
Gerald L. Pearson, Daryl M. Chapin, and Calvin S. Fuller started researching various areas associated with solar, but not active parts of the NASA project. By luck, they met and exchanged ideas. While their individual projects were disappointments, their combined efforts create a much more successful cell using crystallized silicon to convert sunlight into electricity. The efficiency rate of the cells was around 6 percent, a marked development over prior technology. In 1958, NASA launched the Vanguard Spacecraft, which was powered by solar panels.
Man has utilized the power of the sun for heat for a very long time. Just now, however, are we beginning to master the technology to turn it into large amounts of free electricity.
