Featured in Not gone with the wind – 02-2010

Long distance for everyone

The story of solar electricity: The eighth part of our series with chapters from John Perlin’s book From Space to Earth recounts how photovoltaics brought long distance telephone calls to people living in sparsely populated regions.
By
pv magazine

When Bell Laboratories unveiled the silicon solar cell, Gordon Raisbeck, the director of its transistor program, predicted, “One field in which we can see immediate applications for it is communications – telephone, telegraph, radio, and television [where] the power need is small, but it is often needed in remote, inaccessible places where no power lines …

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