Niobium capacitor
The development of solid electrolyte tantalum capacitors began in the early 1950s as a miniaturized, more reliable low-voltage support capacitor to complement the newly invented transistor. The solution found by R. L. Taylor and H. E. Haring of the Bell Labs was based on experience with ceramics. They ground down tantalum to a powder, pressed this powder into a cylindrical form and then sintered the powder particles into a pellet (“slug”) at high temperatures, between 1500 and 2000 °C, under vacuum conditions. These first sintered tantalum capacitors used a non-solid electrolyte not consistent with the concept of solid state electronics. 1952 a targeted search in the Bell Labs for a solid electrolyte by D. A. McLean and F. S. Power led to the invention of manganese dioxide as a solid electrolyte for a sintered tantalum capacitor.
Electrolytic capacitor
William Dubilier, whose first patent for electrolytic capacitors was filed in 1928, industrialized the new ideas for electrolytic capacitors and started the first large commercial production in 1931 in the Cornell-Dubilier (CD) factory in Plainfield, New Jersey. At the same time in Berlin, Germany, the "Hydra-Werke", an AEG company, started the production of e-caps in large quantities.
In his 1896 patent Pollak already recognized that the capacitance of the capacitor increases when roughening the surface of the anode foil. Today (2014), electrochemically etched low voltage foils can achieve an up to 200-fold increase in surface area compared to a smooth surface. Advances in the etching process are the reason for the dimension reductions in aluminum electrolytic capacitors over recent decades.