understood that the single most important thing to do was get a satellite up—and get it up quickly. On the first try, in December 1957, the rocket blew up only two seconds after takeoff, and the satellite was destroyed in a highly embarrassing ball of fire. The failed American satellite was immortalized as “Kaputnik.” A second satellite, Explorer I, was, however, successfully lofted into orbit in January 1958. This satellite, though, was very unadorned, even primitive. The need remained to get up a satellite that would be taken seriously. 8 And that meant accelerating the Vanguard program, which was to put into orbit a civilian research satellite to support the 1958 International Geophysical Year.
But the Vanguard program ignited a critical and acerbic internal battle. How to power the Vanguard satellite once it was in orbit? On this crucial question, the navy, which was responsible for the Vanguard, wanted to use traditional chemical batteries. But on the flank emerged an unlikely adversary in the form of a German scientist named Hans Ziegler, who had been brought to the United States by the U.S. military after World War II. Ziegler had become an American citizen and was working on communications for the military. When Ziegler visited Bell Labs in New Jersey soon after the invention of the silicon-based photovoltaics, he was instantly smitten by the new technology. He believed that man’s ultimate source of energy was destined to be the sun and relentlessly lobbied the armed forces and Congress to “give mankind the benefit of this invention at the earliest possible time.”
The navy, however, had no intention of entrusting the power source of its first satellite to what it described as an unproved “unconventional and not fully established” new invention. But Ziegler convinced a critical government panel that the chemical batteries on Vanguard would last only a few weeks while the experiments aboard Vanguard would “have enormously greater value if they can be kept operating for several months more.”
In the end, Ziegler managed to muscle solar panels onto the Vanguard vehicle, which was launched in March 1958. The orbiting Vanguard helped restore confidence in America’s scientific preeminence.
Vanguard was also the great break that established the credibility for solar cells. How big the break was made clear in a New York Times headline nineteen days after launch: “Vanguard Radio Fails to Report/Chemical Battery Exhausted/Solar Unit Functioning.” A year later Ziegler and his colleagues in the signal corps clinked glasses when the orbiting solar cells were still producing current. Indeed, high above the earth’s atmosphere, the cells would produce sustained electricity over a number of years. Here in the emptiness of outer space was the real-life demonstration for Albert Einstein’s paper “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light.”
From then on, solar cells became standard on satellites, which was their first major market. Hans Ziegler’s ambitions for the technology were still grander. He saw it as “an important source of electrical power” and envisioned “the roofs of all our buildings in cities and towns equipped with solar [cells].” Alas, the cells were still expensive—enormously expensive. And that meant that they were, for the most part, really competitive only in one place: outer space.9
DOWN TO EARTH
A key moment in the journey of photovoltaics down to earth can be dated very precisely: August 1, 1973. That was the day that a start-up company called Solarex opened its doors in Rockville, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. It was founded by two refugees from communist Hungary—Joseph Lindmayer, a brilliant physicist, and Peter Varadi, a very talented chemist. Both had managed to escape from Hungary during the 1956 revolution against Soviet rule.
Lindmayer and Varadi met twelve years later, in 1968, when both started working at Comsat, the quasi-private company that owned the commercial satellites that the U.S. government put into orbit. Lindmayer ran Comsat’s physics laboratory; Varadi, the chemistry lab. Improving the efficiency and reliability of PVs was one of Lindmayer’s prime objectives. Over espresso coffee (what was then considered an exotic European beverage) the two continentals would talk about photovoltaics and muse on their possible applicability to electric generation on earth. But they recognized that the way in which solar cells were manufactured for space—under vacuum conditions to assure very high performance—made them far too expensive for terrestrial use. Lindmayer began turning the problem over and over in his mind. He also began experimenting with totally different approaches in the basement of his house in Bethesda, Maryland. He started to visualize a pathway, which