History of the LED — the Movie 106
ptorrone writes "MAKE Magazine has a fantastic 'Connections'-style video called THE LED — The short documentary has the history of the LED to modern day applications. Starting with the work of Russian Oleg Vladimirovich Losev, which was largely ignored in the 1920s, to making your own 'Cat's Whisker' — a primitive LED made from a metal-semiconductor point-contact junction forming a Schottky barrier diode. The first practical visible-spectrum LED was developed in 1962 by Nick Holonyak Jr., while working at General Electric Company."
YouTube Illumination (Score:0, Informative)
here [youtube.com].
Re:Baby Blues. (Score:5, Informative)
Oh god please, don't say they look cool. If one more thing in my house has a blue LED I'm never going to be able to get a night's sleep ever again. The damn things are like portals into a strange neon blue hell.
Electrical tape works wonders, though.
Good video, small flaw. (Score:4, Informative)
Overall a very good video, but there is a small flaw. The video incorrectly notes that Oleg Vladimirovich Losev was a scientist in Imperial Russia... While Oleg Vladimirovich Losev was born in Imperial Russia, by the time he was working on diodes, it was the Soviet Union.
Other than that, an excellent video that only left we with the question, where do you get chunks of carborundum?
Silicon, not Silicone (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Best not to overdrive them though (Score:2, Informative)
Different points on the crystal have different electrical properties/conductivity.
The fact that it generates light when the probe touches a point does not necessarily mean that the crystal itself is a diode.
But certain points on the crystal may have diode-like properties.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor#Explaining_semiconductor_energy_bands [wikipedia.org]
Re:Baby Blues. (Score:4, Informative)
Yep. A Japanese researcher, Nakamura, finally figured out how to do it and the company he worked for made a fortune overnight. He finally had to sue them for royalties, since the company was making bank and gave him a measly $200 to show their appreciation).
He finally got a $190 million dollar settlement. The company actually made six times that in royalties, and the judge said that he was actually entitled to half, but Nakamura only asked for $190 million, so that's what he got.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20040131a1.html [japantimes.co.jp]
Connections-like? How? (Score:3, Informative)
Neat video. But each Connections episode starts with some piece of technology, and traces it back to its almost surprising and seemingly unrelated origins. This starts with the LED... and traces back to the origins of the LED. No fantastic and surprising connections there. About the only true similarities I see is that The LED narrator and James Burke apparently share the same hairstylist and optomitrist.