The History of Solar Energy
From how long do you think we use sun energy? Most of think it’s just from few years.. yet this technology would be highly developed already, if we worked on it some longer right? As it brings us free electricity, and uses potential of the sun that in our understanding is close to unlimited, it would squeeze fossil fuels out completely in short time, right? Unfortunately no. Researches on solar energy usage have been taking place from a long time. Exactly from the beginning of ninetieth century already. We noticed fist successes in powering a house with solar energy as early as in 1883 – and still we mostly use fossil fuels today.
As early as during ancient times Greeks and Romans used to build their homes at a particular angle, that they calculated in details. Thanks to that they could use minimum quantity of wood to heat the house. That was extremely important as proper wood was a rare commodity that times. Even famous philosopher Socrates once told that each house should be south facing. Thanks to that it’ll be receiving a maximum amount of sunrays during the winter. AfterRoman Empirefallen, the idea of using solar energy disappeared for as along as about two thousand years.
And then the renewal time came. During Industrial Revolution people started massively using fossil fuels to produce electricity. Auguste Mouchout was the first to invent solar battery. He understood the limitations of oil and coal so long ago, when it seems that some people can’t see them even today. These times we were finding new resources of oil and coal on a regular basis. That was the reason no one could actually imagine we’ll ever run out of them. in 1861 first solar battery working fully on solar energy was build. We can say that was the firs free energy generator in the history. Bad luck that was the time when coal prices were dropping down rapidly, and the device was expensive. So it didn’t become popular and was forgotten for obvious reasons.
From then until oil crisis in 1973 all debate about solar energy was limited strictly to scientific circles. Although in 1921 Albert Einstein received Nobel Prize for his researches on principle of photoelectric effects on electrical generation, it didn’t bring any practical breakout. Even when in 1953 Bell Laboratories created a silicon based solar cell that was able to create some electricity it was still much to expensive to become popular.
Yet after 1973 solar panels were developed rapidly. That was mainly thanks to huge sums governments put into researches that led to more efficiency and lower costs of these technologies. Now it’s available for many people even in the form of solar-panels-home-systems.