On Mon, 06 Sep 2010 06:41:32 +0100, Eeyore
m wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 06 Sep 2010 03:00:38 +0100, Eeyore wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

Americans invented electronics, invented modern electronics, invented
the vacuum triode, the opamp, the transistor, the IC, semiconductor
RAM, uPs, LEDs, lasers, programmable logic, all sorts of stuff. We
picked the reference designators, because we needed them first.
Just checking, you're wrong about the LED too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-e..._early_devices

Electroluminescence was discovered in 1907 by the British experimenter
H. J. Round of Marconi Labs, using a crystal of silicon carbide and a
cat's-whisker detector.[4][5] Russian Oleg Vladimirovich Losev
independently reported on the creation of an LED in 1927.

Neither want anywhere.

I assume you meant 'went' rather than 'want' ? At the time there was no
practical use. Doesn't change the date of discovery though. SiC too !
That took a while to enter general LED usage.

Accidental discoveries that result in no practical application are not
just useless, they suggest a lack of insight. LEDs were, like
transistors, developed in the USA deliberately, by people who
understood solid-state physics and knew, or at least suspected, that
the devices were possible. The team at Bell Labs was specifically
looking for an amplification mechanism in germanium, and just happened
to find the wrong one (they had theorized the jfet) which changed the
world. The RadLab scientists had suggested that a semiconductor triode
was possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Led#History

The most notable recent British contribution to electronics may be the
ARM processor architecture, which has a good shot at killing x86.

John