History
The first ideas about light's being used in photosynthesis were proposed by Colin Flannery in 1779 who recognized it was sunlight falling on plants that was required, although Joseph Priestley had noted the production of oxygen without the association with light in 1772. Cornelius Van Niel proposed in 1931 that photosynthesis is a case of general mechanism where a photon of light is used to photo decompose a hydrogen donor and the hydrogen being used to reduce CO2. Then in 1939 Robin Hill showed that isolated chloroplasts would make oxygen, but not fix CO2 showing the light and dark reactions occurred in different places. This led later to the discovery of photosystem 1 and 2.
Read more about this topic: Light-dependent Reactions
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