LED Forty Years Older Than Thought

LED lover writes "The discovery of the LED is usually credited to four US groups in 1962, but an unrecognized Russian genius got there forty years before. Oleg Losev even filed a patent on using his device for long range communications, and wrote to Einstein to ask for help with the theory — but got no reply."

Comments

Re:How often does this happen?

[dattaway]

I wouldn't call LED's an invention. Light emitted by a diode is a common side effect, usually undesirable. Glass diodes have a problem if exposed to light, will generate a voltage like a solar cell. This is bad in audio and RF circuits when you want minimal noise.

Open up a transistor or diode and you can get a few hundred millivolts off the surface. Some diode junctions will transmit a red or infrared light.

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[brian.gunderson]

I'm amazed it took so long for that post.

Another Russian

[kidcharles]

Here's another Russian who was ahead of his time.

It's kind of sweet and sad, really.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I could imagine Losev (four letters away from Loser) coming up with an obvious and brilliant idea. And he sits there and thinks - "This is SUCH A GREAT IDEA! I must contact the greatest mind in physics and see if he can confirm this great idea and perhaps GREAT THINGS will happen of it! Excellent!"

So he thinks - who is the greatest mind in physics? He asks his wife, Tonya -

"Olga, darling, I think I will contact EINSTEIN about my great glowing semiconductor idea!"

Olga replies, "Sure honey. He's really smart. And well connected, especially since they've been confirming his ideas left and right. sounds good to me!"

So, with great pride and hope, Losev licks the stamp on the letter and walks down the street to set it off. He holds it to his heart before he puts it in the post box, and makes a small hope that Einstein will see the beauty of his idea and help him, then with finality and hope, he puts the letter in the box.

Then he and Olga went to go boil some rats for dinner, because Russia in 1922 was a freakin' mess.

RS

Re:How often does this happen?

[WED Fan]

I'm not anti-corporation. I love corporations, capitalism, and money. But, one of the main reasons ideas like this get buried is because the person explaining the idea is incapable of explaining it to those who would back him/her. Call it PHB syndrome.

Saw this at HP. Someone comes up with a brilliant piece of technology. It goes nowhere. Two years later, another person with some added marketing ability comes up with the same idea and it takes off. Then the first person says, "But, I came up with that, here are the drawings and emails." Sure enough, he did, but it was so misunderstood at the time that nobody could grasp the idea.

Also, placing yourself in a good position to be heard helps. One guy at HP was a world class crackpot. For every good idea he had, he was flooding his managers with 100 ideas that ran the gamout from Rube Goldberg, conspiracies, implementation prohibitive schemes to down-right illegal-by-the-laws-of-physics-and-animal-husbandr y. Needless to say, he was ignored most of the time.

Re:Patents

[iamacat]

I didn't read any of the MP3 patents, but I see that they are not making their work available to the important open source community. So, I am going to invite a bunch of people to compare uncompressed vs compressed music and independently develop an algorithm to strip off waveforms that don't seem to matter as much as others. This algorithm may or may not share some concepts with MP3. But, according to you, I should get a patent for it anyway. After all, I made a very important contribution to the world through my own work, a contribution that wouldn't have happened from the work of the earlier inventor.

Re:How often does this happen?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Sorry, I think you are a fool. There is no way to get around that people are people.

Not all people are people. I should know- I'm one of the 1/186 people who aren't. Autism is considered a defect by the rest of you- but I know better. My lack of empathy allows me to see things in a VERY different way- and not take stupid emotions like greed into account. We're already superior to you NTs who lie, cheat, and steal.