FYI,

"Solar Energy Celebrates 50th Anniversary"
Associated Press
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040427/ap_on_sc/solar_c=
ell_anniversary


: Fifty years ago, two Oregon scientists stood on the wide, green lawn
: of Bell Labs headquarters in New Jersey to announce the world
: finally had a way to turn sunlight into electricity.

: Daryl Chapin, an electrical engineer, and Gerald Pearson, a
: physicist, joined chemist Calvin Fuller on April 25, 1954, to
: demonstrate the first practical solar cell made of silicon — later
: to become the prime ingredient in computer chips.

: But it had taken more than a century since French experimental
: physicist Edmund Becquerel discovered the photovoltaic effect in
: 1839 before the process that converts light into electricity could
: be commercialized with the technology developed by the Bell Labs
: trio.

: "An amazingly simple-looking apparatus made of strips of silicon
: showed how the sun's rays could be used to power ... a transistor
: radio transmitter carrying both speech and music," the original
: press release from Bell Labs said.

: Chapin and Pearson were both graduates of Willamette University in
: Salem, which awarded them honorary doctorates for their work in
: 1956.

: Their research with Fuller built on the theories about the
: photoelectric effect that won the Nobel Prize for Albert Einstein in
: 1921.

: The trio were originally searching for a solution to battery
: problems within the Bell telephone system when they created a solar
: photovoltaic cell capable of generating enough power from the sun to
: run electrical equipment.

: "It was a modest application at first — they were just trying to
: power a small radio," said Alice E. White, director of integrated
: photonics research at what is now Lucent Technologies Bell Labs.

: A half century later, solar cells power everything from wallet
: calculators to the Mars Rover.

: They have also significantly reduced the cost of energy as the
: technology has been refined.

: "At the time, manufacturing costs were over $1,700 per watt. But
: costs fell to $20 per watt by the 1970s and are now about $3 per
: watt," said Christopher Dymond, solar specialist for the Oregon
: Department of Energy.

Mark Reiff