Here's something completely different...A collection of solar cells, starting with selenium sensors (remember the "electric eye" on automatic doors?), from around 1933.
This collection from the Museum of Solar Energy is far from complete, but shows a nice bit of history, and has great high-resolution photography.
And so you don't have to look it up, Vanguard, the first US satellite, and the first satellite to have a solar array -- six cells from Bell Labs, was launched in 1957. It had two low-power radio transmitters for tracking and for gathering data on the ionosphere. The battery-powered transmitter ran for about 2 weeks; the solar-powered transmitter ran for more than six year -- until the radiation in the Van Allen belt killed the electronics, including the solar cells...
In a previous life I made solar cells and modules, and built factories -- in the US -- to make them. Here's one of the cells, from around 1982 when we were developing Solarex's cast polycrystalline silicon wafers.
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