History of Solar Energy

Ancient Greeks and Romans saw great benefit in what we now refer to as passive solar design - the use of architecture to make use of the sun’s capacity to light and heat indoor spaces.
Romans advanced the art by covering south facing building openings with glass or mica to hold in the heat of the winter sun. Through calculated use of the solar energy, Greeks and Romans offset the need to burn wood that was often in short supply.
Auguste Mouchout, was the inventor of the first active solar motor. In 1861, Mouchout developed a steam engine powered entirely by the sun. But its high costs coupled with the falling price of English coal doomed his invention to become a footnote in energy history.
Solar Energy In Europe
Nevertheless, solar energy continued to intrigue and attract European scientists through the 19th century. Scientists developed large cone-shaped collectors that could boil ammonia to perform work like locomotion and refrigeration. France and England briefly hoped that solar energy could power their growing operations in the sunny colonies of Africa and East Asia.
Solar Energy In The United States
In the United States, Swedish-born John Ericsson led efforts to harness solar power. He designed the “parabolic trough collector,” a technology which functions more than a hundred years later on the same basic design.
In 1953, Bell Laboratories (now AT&T labs) scientists Gerald Pearson, Daryl Chapin and Calvin Fuller developed the first silicon solar cell capable of generating a measurable electric current.
In 1956, solar photovoltaic (PV) cells were far from economically practical.
Electricity from solar cells ran about $300 per watt. The “Space Race” of the 1950s and 60s gave modest opportunity for progress in solar, as satellites and crafts used solar paneling for electricity.
The hope in the 1970s was that through massive investment in subsidies and research, solar photovoltaic costs could drop precipitously and eventually become competitive with fossil fuels.
By the 1990s, the reality was that costs of solar energy had dropped as predicted, but costs of fossil fuels had also dropped—solar was competing with a falling baseline.
However, huge PV market growth in Japan and Germany from the 1990s to the present has reenergized the solar industry. Meanwhile, solar thermal water heating is an increasingly cost-effective means of lowering gas and electricity demand.
As you’ve seen, technologies have changed and improved for decades. Still, the basics of solar thermal and photovoltaic have remained the same.