Short answers, pulled from the story.
Edmond Becquerel discovered the first photovoltaic cell in 1839 while working in his father's laboratory. This discovery created the world's first photovoltaic cell that produced a tiny current when exposed to light.
The first practical photovoltaic cell was publicly demonstrated at Bell Laboratories on the 25th of April 1954 by inventors Calvin Souther Fuller, Daryl Chapin, and Gerald Pearson. This silicon device achieved an efficiency of six percent and marked the birth of the modern solar age.
The United States launched the Vanguard 1 satellite in 1958 as the first spacecraft to use solar cells as its primary power source. This mission extended the spacecraft's life indefinitely compared to battery-powered predecessors and established solar power as the standard for space exploration.
The price of solar modules in the mid-1970s was approximately ninety-six dollars per watt and dropped by more than ninety-nine percent to thirty cents per watt by 2018. This dramatic cost reduction was driven by Swanson's Law which states that solar cell prices fall twenty percent for every doubling of industry capacity.
Crystalline silicon accounts for ninety-five percent of the commercial solar cell market today. These cells are made from wafers that are between 160 and 240 micrometers thick and cut from cylindrical ingots grown by the Czochralski process.
China controls over 80 percent of all manufacturing stages for solar panels and maintained a dominant market share of 77.8 percent as the world's largest PV module producer in 2022. In the first half of 2023, China's production of PV modules exceeded 220 gigawatts marking an increase of over 62 percent compared to the same period in 2022.