On Wed, 15 Oct 2014 09:10:56 -0400, Michael Black wrote:

On Tue, 14 Oct 2014, micky wrote:

I think 3 people won the Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the blue
LED.

Did the inventor of the first (red) LED get a Nobel prize. It seems a
lot harder to invent the first one than the third or fourth.

The red guy perhaps was the first to think of the idea, but even if not,
he had to think it could be done and then go do it.

The blue guy just has to try many many combinations unitil he finds one
that is blue. Just because it's the last piece in the puzzle, I don't
think it's Nobel-worthy.

This is a repair question?

They are judging on impact. The LED was around for some years, expensive
and a lab curiosity, and then in the early seventies we were able to buy
them as surplus. Not very bright, but even about the same time as we
could get red LEDs cheap, there were green and orange and yellow. A neat
thing, but they weren't a radical change. Anything you could do with
LEDs could be done with incandescent light bulbs. Lots of things get
invented, and don't win a Nobel Prize.

And the decades went by, finally a blue LED. That was neat, started all
kinds of talk about RGB LEDs to make tv sets or other displays. I remember
how bright those blue ones were even when they'd filtered down to the
hobby market. Suddenly, you could use LEDs as flashlights, if you could
live with blue. I don't know if they affected what had come before, but
suddenly you could also get easily high light output red LEDs.

It's worth pointing out that it took a long time for blue LEDs to come
along because it wasn't a matter of minor changes to LEDs to get differetn
colors (or at least not after the initial orange/green/yellow), but a
different process. It was a case of having to start from scratch.

And then not that much later, white LEDs, as someone pointed out, they
happened because blue were available and were the foundation of white
LEDs.

So suddenly we could have flashlights that were "normal" light, and no
more flashlights that didn't work when they were needed because the
filament broke.

And a whole lot more development happened as a result. There was limited
use for high light output red or green LEDs, but a lot of use for high
output white LEDs. Whole different design, not the packaged LEDs as we
know it, but a different package so the LED could be heatsinked and they
didn't need the lens in the package to get more light output (or direct
the light). So no more need for that long extension cord when you need
that trouble light, this thing is bright enough to temporarily blind you
if you look at it suddenly in the dark.

Wham, no more CFL bulbs in monitors, just white LEDs for the backlight,
longer life and probably lower current drain.

And then LED bulbs to replace incandescent and more recently CFL bulbs.
They seem to work better than the CFLs, but they certainly use less
current for the same light output as incandescent. So that will impact on
things in the long run, lower demands for electricity in the home, or in
places where there really isn't electricity, real electric lighting that
can be powered off a battery and solar cells to recharge it.

They are looking at the big picture.

Michael


Well, sort of. The Nobel is a political award, as evidenced by giving one
to Yassir Arafat an aging ex-terrorist. The blue improvement was
incremental compared to making LEDs the first time. Also just look at
what body controls the awards.

?-)