INTRODUCTORY SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY ... - PHOTON Info

Under the Sun
selling book, »A Guide to the Photovoltaic
Revolution.« »It was a bit of a farce in a
way because I still believed we would be
fully economic by 1986,« he says. »I really
thought we were going to make it.«
18
As PHOTON launches its coverage
of the American market, we decided
to journey back along the twisty, usu-
ally lonely, road PV has traveled in this
country to reach the point where its
promise as an industry, although no-
where near realized, has at least moved
beyond the abstract. With history as
our teacher, here are some lessons that
we’ve learned on our trip.
Lesson one: Beginnings are messy
The most romantic recounting of
how an invention or an industry is born
goes a little like this: a misunderstood
genius toils in obscurity, obsessed with
an impossible idea until, after a color-
ful »a-ha« moment, a magical break-
through – think Christopher Lloyd in
the movie »Back to the Future.«
Reality is less simple, of course, and
it’s no exaggeration to say that the inven-
tion of the solar cell was the result of a
combination of hard work, luck and ri-
valry. In 1950s America, like today, some
of the most important centers of scien-
tific innovation were sponsored by com-
panies looking for products to take from
the lab to the marketplace. One such
company was Western Bell Telephone,
whose Bell Labs had, in 1947, famously
developed the transistor, one of the es-
sential components for the microproces-
sor that would eventually be created –
and arguably change the world with its
incorporation into personal computers
– a couple of decades later.
With this commercial bent to its sci-
entific inquiries, Bell Labs in the mid-
1950s was looking to develop a device
that could power telephone repeater
stations in remote areas; long telephone
lines needed repeater stations every 50
miles or so to ensure that a signal could
get through and those devices needed
a reliable source of power. The work of
three Bell scientists – Daryl Chapin,
Calvin Fuller and Gerald Pearson – co-
alesced to produce a product the phone
company could use: a so-called »solar
battery,« or the first silicon solar cell.
But it almost never happened. First of
all, Chapin, Fuller and Pearson weren’t
working as a team, at least not initially,
to invent a silicon solar cell. For his
part, Chapin, tasked with solving the
repeater dilemma, was intrigued with
the possibility of tapping sunlight for
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power. But his initial attempts using a
selenium cell were fruitless, yielding
not nearly enough electricity for his
purposes. Meanwhile, Fuller and Pear-
son were working together to probe the
electronic possibilities of silicon as a
way to improve transistors; an exten-
sion of earlier work Fuller had done at
Bell in which, by doping silicon with
tiny amounts of lithium, he had cre-
ated a p-n junction, an essential dis-
covery allowing for the creation of
electrical fields in semiconductors.
Then, one day in 1953, the work of
Frederic Neema / photon-pictures.com
the three scientists converged, thanks to
a little bit of luck. After Pearson had laid
out some of the materials he was testing
on his laboratory desk, he noticed some-
thing unusual. The sunlight streaming
in through the lab window hit some of
the experimental silicon lying on his
desk and, because the silicon was hooked
up to a measurement device, registered a
relatively significant electrical current.
Pearson hadn’t expected this reaction
and, frankly, didn’t really believe it. So
he called Morton Prince – who would
later help refine and improve the silicon
cell his colleagues invented – into his of-
fice to make sure he wasn’t seeing things.
He wasn’t, and Pearson soon let Chapin,
whom he knew was struggling, know
about his unexpected silicon discovery.
At first, Pearson, Chapin and Fuller, now
working together, were unable to boost
the efficiency of their silicon solar cell
beyond 4 percent – it needed to be closer
to 6 percent to be a viable power source –
and Bell executives seemed on the verge
of forcing the trio to move on to other,
more commercially promising things.
That is, until a rival lab, RCA, the re-
search arm of the Radio Corporation of
America, scored a major publicity coup –
complete with a presentation at New York’s
Radio City Music Hall – when it unveiled its
so-called nuclear silicon cell, which relied
on highly radioactive strontium-90 instead
of the sun for PHOTONs to turn into elec-
tricity. »RCA took out a big ad and splashed
it in the paper,« recalls Morton Prince. »The
management at Bell Labs said what RCA
did with their device is nonsense.«
»
Determined to one-up its rival, Bell
Labs’ managers leaned on the scientists
to fully develop their silicon solar cell.
Ultimately, the Bell solar battery – with
efficiency improvements yielded by
adding boron and arsenic to the sili-
con – generated a stunning fifty million
times more power than its nuclear coun-
terpart. The Bell solar battery was rolled
out to the public over two days, first at
a press conference at Bell’s New Jersey
headquarters, where the solar arrays were
used to turn a 21-inch high Ferris wheel,
and then at Washington, DC’s National
November 2009