The idea behind this story of electricity is to map it’s development from Thales’ early observations of static, to today. This amazing story of ingenuity and progress, featuring legends and unknowns alike, has profoundly altered the path of our development.   

So how does the ultra-thin photovoltaic breakthrough led by Professor Vivian Alberts at UJ fit into this story? When placed in context, CIGSSe technology sits alongside the Faraday Disk, The Ganz Machine and the invention of the first lightbulb thereby placing this great leap in electrical generation into the context of the living history and the future of electricity.

 When looking at the history of electricity, it is certainly not linear. Great breakthroughs never happened in isolation. The work that led to famous inventions was carried out often in parallel with the work of others and as result there is a collision of different ideas at critical times. Considering this the only really relevant visual format with which to simplify these developments and bring order to such an intricate story is an electrical circuit.