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Ancestors of Pueblo people called Anasazi in North America live in south-facing
cliff dwellings that capture the winter sun. -
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Swiss scientist Horace de Saussure was credited with building the world’s first
solar collector, later used by Sir John Herschel to cook food during his South Africa
expedition in the 1830s. See the Solar Cooking Archive for more information on
http://solarcooking.org/saussure.htm Sassure and His Hot Boxes of the 1700s. -
On September 27, 1816, Robert Stirling applied for a patent for his economiser
at the Chancery in Edinburgh, Scotland. By trade, Robert Stirling was actually
a minister in the Church of Scotland and he continued to give services until
he was eighty-six years old! But, in his spare time, he built heat engines in his
home workshop. Lord Kelvin used one of the working models during some of
his university classes. This engine was later used in the dish/Stirling system, a
solar thermal electric techn -
French scientist Edmond Becquerel discovers the photovoltaic effect while
experimenting with an electrolytic cell made up of two metal electrodes placed
in an electricity-conducting solution—electricity-generation increased when
exposed to light. -
French mathematician August Mouchet proposed an idea for solar-powered steam
engines. In the following two decades, he and his assistant, Abel Pifre, constructed
the first solar powered engines and used them for a variety of applications. These
engines became the predecessors of modern parabolic dish collectors. -
1876 William Grylls Adams and Richard Evans Day discover that selenium
produces electricity when exposed to light. Although selenium solar cells failed
to convert enough sunlight to power electrical equipment, they proved that a
solid material could change light into electricity without heat or moving parts. -
Samuel P. Langley, invents the bolometer, which is used to measure light from
the faintest stars and the sun’s heat rays. It consists of a fine wire connected
to an electric circuit. When radiation falls on the wire, it becomes very slightly
warmer. This increases the electrical resistance of the wire. -
Charles Fritts, an American inventor, described the first solar cells made from
selenium wafers. -
1908 William J. Bailley of the Carnegie Steel Company invents a solar collector
with copper coils and an insulated box—roughly, it’s present design. -
1947 Passive solar buildings in the United States were in such demand, as a
result of scarce energy during the prolonged W.W.II, that Libbey-Owens-Ford
Glass Company published a book entitled Your Solar House, which profiled
forty-nine of the nation’s greatest solar architects. -
Architect Frank Bridgers designed the world’s first commercial office building
using solar water heating and passive design. This solar system has been
continuously operating since that time and the Bridgers-Paxton Building, is
now in the National Historic Register as the world’s first solar heated office
building. -
1954 Photovoltaic technology is born in the United States when Daryl Chapin,
Calvin Fuller, and Gerald Pearson develop the silicon photovoltaic (PV) cell at
Bell Labs—the first solar cell capable of converting enough of the sun’s energy
into power to run everyday electrical equipment. Bell Telephone Laboratories
produced a silicon solar cell with 4% efficiency and later achieved 11%
efficiency. -
The University of Delaware builds “Solar One,” one of the world’s first photovoltaic
(PV) powered residences. The system is a PV/thermal hybrid. The
roof-integrated arrays fed surplus power through a special meter to the utility
during the day and purchased power from the utility at night. In addition to
electricity, the arrays acted as flat-plate thermal collectors, with fans blowing
the warm air from over the array to phase-change heat-storage bins. -
Dr. Alvin Marks receives patents for two solar power technologies he
developed: Lepcon and Lumeloid. Lepcon consists of glass panels covered with
a vast array of millions of aluminum or copper strips, each less than a micron or
thousandth of a millimeter wide. As sunlight hits the metal strips, the energy in
the light is transferred to electrons in the metal, which escape at one end in the
form of electricity. Lumeloid uses a similar approach but substitutes cheaper,
film-like sheets of plastic -
Spectrolab, Inc. and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory develop a
photovoltaic solar cell that converts 32.3 percent of the sunlight that hits it into
electricity. The high conversion efficiency was achieved by combining three
layers of photovoltaic materials into a single solar cell. The cell performed most
efficiently when it received sunlight concentrated to 50 times normal. To use
such cells in practical applications, the cell is mounted in a device that uses lenses
or mirrors to conce -
NASA successfully conducts two tests of a solar-powered, remote-controlled
aircraft called Pathfinder Plus. In the first test in July, researchers
demonstrated the aircraft’s use as a high-altitude platform for telecommunications
technologies. Then, in September, a test demonstrated
its use as an aerial imaging system for coffee growers.