How governments spurred the rise of solar power

IN 1954 AT&T’s Bell Labs announced, with some fanfare, a “solar battery”—a device which would supply electricity constantly, with no need for recharging, whenever it was illuminated. At a time when scientific miracles were much in vogue, the New York Times thought this gadget front-page news: the conversion of sunlight into electrical power might herald “the realisation of one of mankind’s most cherished dreams—the harnessing of the almost limitless energy of the Sun for the uses of civilisation.”

One could quibble with the idea that industrialising solar power was one of humankind’s most cherished dreams—search for it in Shakespeare and you search in vain—but it had certainly had its enthusiasts. As they were and remain keen to inform all and sundry, sunlight delivers more energy to the Earth in an hour than humankind uses in a year. Until 1954, though, the heliophiles could offer no better way of using that bounty than as an agent for warming water and generating steam—tasks that coal and gas performed much more readily. The solar battery offered instead a direct route to solar power; light went in, current came out. There were no moving parts to wear out or break down; just little sheets of silicon the size of razor blades.