Of
Thomas Becker
In the beginning there was the light, already clear. But it took a while to realize that something like electricity could be conjured up from it. In 1839, the French physicist Alexandre Edmond Becquerel researched the photoelectric effect, to which a certain Albert Einstein later referred in his theory of light quanta and who – let’s cut it short – half a century later caused the first satellite with solar cells to orbit the earth, for six years. At least now photovoltaics was in the world, the conversion of sunlight into energy.