Abstract
Today, Edmond Becquerel's name is associated with the discovery, in 1839, of the photovoltaic effect, thanks to the production of an electric current by the action of light on a metal coated with a silver salt immersed in an electrolyte. For his contemporaries, he was much more than the author of the description of this effect, which at the time had no interpretation or energetic application. It was against the backdrop of the birth of photography that Becquerel built the apparatus that used this effect to clarify the chemical action of light. His skills as an experimenter in electricity and the properties of light, as an inventor of instruments, as a bridge-builder between physics, chemistry, meteorology and medicine, and finally his involvement in what was then called "the applications of physics to art and industry", highlight the role of experimental physics and precision industry in technological innovation in the 19thcentury .
