Charles Fritts
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Charles Fritts was an American inventor credited with creating the first working solar cell in 1884.
Fritts coated the semiconductor material selenium with an extremely thin layer of gold. The resulting cells had a conversion efficiency of only about 1% owing to the properties of selenium, which in combination with the material's high cost prevented the use of such cells for energy supply. Selenium cells found other applications however, for example as light sensors for exposure timing in photo cameras, where they were common well into the 1960s.
Solar cells later became practical for power uses after Russell Ohl's 1940s development of silicon p/n junction cells that reached efficiencies above 5% by the 1950s/1960s.
Today silicon solar cells are about 17% efficient in the lab, but that performance deteriorates over time to less than 10% in real world applications.
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