Charles Fritts was an American inventor credited with creating the first working solar cell

Solar cell

A solar cell is a solid state electrical device that converts the energy of light directly into electricity by the photovoltaic effect....

 in 1883.

Fritts coated the semiconductor

Semiconductor

A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity due to electron flow intermediate in magnitude between that of a conductor and an insulator. This means a conductivity roughly in the range of 103 to 10−8 siemens per centimeter...

 material selenium

Selenium

Selenium is a chemical element with atomic number 34, chemical symbol Se, and an atomic mass of 78.96. It is a nonmetal, whose properties are intermediate between those of adjacent chalcogen elements sulfur and tellurium...

 with an extremely thin layer of gold. The resulting cells had a conversion efficiency of only about 1% owing to the properties of selenium, which in combination with the material's high cost prevented the use of such cells for energy supply. Selenium cells found other applications however, for example as light sensors for exposure timing in photo cameras, where they were common well into the 1960s.

Solar cells later became practical for power uses after Russell Ohl

Russell Ohl

Russell Shoemaker Ohl was an American engineer who is generally recognized for patenting the modern solar cell ....

's 1941 development of silicon p/n junction cells that reached efficiencies above 5% by the 1950s/1960s.

Today's best silicon solar cells are over 20% efficient, with industrial average over 13%.

See also

• Timeline of solar energy