By WILLIAM McCALL PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)
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.
In addition, a little reverse engineering has made photovoltaic cells essential to the Internet.
By reversing the process and converting electric signals into light, data and other types of communication signals can be carried over high-capacity fiber optic lines that link high-speed networks.
``The Internet backbone wouldn't be possible without fiber optics switched with photodetectors,'' said Adam Grossberg, a Bell Labs spokesman.
Reprinted with permission
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