Charles Fritts

Charles Fritts was an American inventor who in 1883 built the first working solar cell, coating a thin layer of selenium with a nearly transparent layer of gold to create a device that converted light directly into a small electric current. Frittss selenium cells were extremely inefficient by later standards, converting under one percent of incident sunlight into electricity, and he found no significant practical application for them in his own time, but his device was the first demonstrated proof that sunlight could be turned directly into usable electric current through a solid-state device rather than a mechanical heat engine. His pioneering selenium cell predates the silicon photovoltaic technology that would eventually make solar power practical by more than seventy years. Fritts is credited as the inventor of the first true solar cell, the ancestor of the modern photovoltaic panel.