Charles Fritts builds the first solar cell, sparking a new energy era

Story: 1883 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 1, 1883

In a New York workshop in 1883 C.E., an inventor named Charles Fritts pressed a thin layer of gold onto a selenium wafer and watched something remarkable happen: it produced electricity from light. The cell was faint and inefficient by any modern measure, but it was the first working photovoltaic device ever built — and it pointed toward a future that would take more than a century to fully arrive.

Key findings

• Solar cell efficiency: Fritts’s selenium-and-gold cell converted sunlight to electricity at just 1 to 2 percent efficiency — a fraction of the 15 to 20 percent achieved by modern photovoltaic panels, but a genuine proof of concept.
• Photovoltaic effect: The underlying science traced back to French physicist Edmond Becquerel, who observed in 1839 C.E. that light striking certain materials could produce an electric current — a discovery Fritts turned into hardware decades later.
• Selenium module: Fritts reported that his device produced a current “that is continuous, constant, and of considerable force” — language that would have sounded extraordinary to anyone still relying on coal and gas for power.

What Fritts actually built

Fritts was not a theoretical physicist. He was a practical inventor working in an era when electricity itself was still new and strange to most Americans. His solar cell was built by coating selenium — a non-metallic element known to respond to light — with an ultra-thin layer of gold to allow light to pass through while still conducting electricity.

The result was a working device. Small, slow, and inefficient, but real.

He later installed an array of these cells on a New York City rooftop — one of the earliest known instances of solar power being used on a building. He sent one of his panels to Werner von Siemens, the German electrical engineer, who recognized its significance immediately. Siemens brought Fritts’s work to the attention of European scientists, helping it reach a wider audience than it might otherwise have found.

The broader context matters here. Fritts was building on a chain of discovery that stretched across continents. Becquerel’s 1839 C.E. observation in France. French mathematician Augustin Mouchot’s solar-powered engines in the 1860s C.E. German physicist Heinrich Hertz’s discovery that ultraviolet light releases electrons from metal surfaces. Russian scientist Aleksandr Stoletov’s work on the photoelectric effect in 1888 C.E. Solar science was never the project of one nation or one tradition — it was assembled piece by piece, across languages and borders.

The long road from cell to panel

Fritts’s selenium cell sat at the beginning of a very long road. In 1888 C.E., inventor Edward Weston received two U.S. patents for solar cells. That same year, Stoletov built the first solar cell based on the photoelectric effect. American inventors continued filing solar patents through the 1890s C.E. and into the early 20th century.

The real leap came in 1954 C.E., when Bell Laboratories researchers Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller, and Gerald Pearson built a silicon solar cell that achieved 6 percent efficiency. Silicon, it turned out, was far better suited to the task than selenium. Their device is widely described as the first practical solar cell — the point at which solar power became genuinely usable, if not yet affordable.

Cost remained the central problem for decades. Silicon cells were expensive to produce. Combining them into panels made them more expensive still. It took an energy crisis in the 1970s C.E., federal legislation, and eventually dramatic drops in manufacturing costs to bring solar within reach of ordinary households.

By the early 21st century, the U.S. Solar Investment Tax Credit enacted in 2006 C.E. helped push average annual solar growth to around 50 percent per year over the following decade. Installation costs fell more than 70 percent in that same period.

Lasting impact

What Fritts demonstrated in 1883 C.E. — that sunlight could be converted directly into electricity through a solid material — established the conceptual foundation for every solar panel manufactured today. The physics he put to practical use, built on Becquerel’s discovery and Hertz’s research, became the basis for an industry that now generates hundreds of gigawatts of electricity globally.

The University of Delaware built one of the first solar-integrated buildings, “Solar One,” in 1973 C.E. Modern building-applied photovoltaic technology integrates solar cells directly into roof tiles and glass facades — a direction Fritts’s rooftop installation in New York arguably gestured toward, more than 140 years ago.

Solar energy is now the fastest-growing electricity source in the world. The thread from a gold-coated wafer in a New York workshop to a global clean energy transition is long, tangled, and involves thousands of contributors — but it runs in a straight line from that first cell.

Blindspots and limits

Fritts’s cell was far too inefficient to power anything meaningful, and the path from his proof of concept to usable solar technology took more than seven decades and required massive public investment to complete. The history of solar innovation is also heavily documented through the lens of American and European inventors, while parallel work in other regions — and the contributions of scientists and engineers whose names rarely appear in patent records — remains less visible in the mainstream account.

The Smithsonian’s history of solar panels notes the lineage of discovery clearly, but even it centers largely on U.S. and European patent holders. The full global picture of solar science is still being written.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Smithsonian Magazine — A brief history of solar panels

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
• Indigenous land rights at COP30: 160 million hectares recognized
• The Good News for Humankind archive on renewable energy

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