Bell Labs Silicon Solar Cell

In 1954 Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller and Gerald Pearson of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey made the first practical device for converting sunlight into useful electric power, a silicon cell of about six percent efficiency, demonstrated on 25 April 1954 and presented to the National Academy of Sciences that May. Selenium cells had existed since the 1880s but were far too weak to matter. The Bell cell is the ancestor of every solar panel, and its first working job, in 1957, was powering a telephone repeater in Americus, Georgia.