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History of the LED — the Movie
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."
It was such an enlightening experience.
glad to see more selection in LED holiday lighting this year, the price premium is a bitch tho... but provides such a superior shine. anyways... where am i?
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
This movie is to diode for
One man with a gun can control 100 without one
Once when I was a very young geek I had an array of LEDs set up for some purpose. I accidently added 10V to the power supply due to a lack of attention and bad UI design. Every single LED burst. It smelt horrible and I got out of there fast. Switched off the power supply first though.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
"making your own 'Cat's Whisker' â" a primitive LED made from a metal-semiconductor point-contact junction forming a Schottky barrier diode"
Man is my cat pissed at me.
Interesting. Thing I wonder is I remember when blue LEDS were difficult and expensive to produce. Now almost every piece of equipment I have has a blue LED on it.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
'A History of Light and Lighting' (4.5 Billion BC to 2005...) makes no mention of Mr. Holonyak...perhaps someone needs to build a fire under Mr. Williams.
here.
Intellectual property was the desert property of the twenth century.
But can I get an LED to match the shade of lipstick this dude(?) is wearing????
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?
Can't anyone keep the difference between silicon and silicone straight? Silicon: element, component of semiconductors (and some blue LEDs made from silicon carbide); Silicone: compound, used for breast implants
I've found the purely LED lighting to be reasonably priced, it's the SOLAR led fairy lights that are the killer.
I have a pretty darn large garden with many large trees, I'd love to have them all twinkling, but don't want power cables running all over the place. Solar fairy lights would be the answer if they weren't $70AUD or so for a couple of hundred globes.
Still, they are dropping, so, hopefully next year will be the year of a garden enveloped in light for no electrical cost.
My late grand father used to do that, too, when he was a kid. In fact I believe his own father had done that, too.
Has anyone experimented with a SiC coated tool as an LED? SiC coated tools are easier to find than SiC crystal.
It's nice to be reminded that making shows like these actually take some talent, experience and skill. Decent programs require actors who can deliver the lines convincingly (and sympathetically), script writers who understand the difference between first and third person perspective, and editors that can figure out how to make the different camera angles show us what's being talked about, instead of what's happening somewhere else.
What am I saying? Production values on this are just bad enough, it reminds me that even the crappy shows on television have SOME work put into them.
Thanks!
here
It's too bad the narrator tried to demonstrate his circuit-design skills. Near the end of the video he powers an LED by connecting it directly across a disc battery. The only reason he didn't burn up his LED is because the voltages and temperatures were just right, but even that lucky break might have evaporated over a matter of minutes as the LED warmed up. When operating LEDs, you always want to have a current-limiting resistor or circuit in place -- always. The reason is that an LED's voltage/current/temperature relationship contradicts naive assumptions about electrical conductors.
To say this concisely, unless you have an unlimited semiconductor budget, "boys and girls, don't try this at home!"
The LED Museum seriously will enlighten you. What a classic.
The video was good, also.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Soldiers in the (first) 2 World Wars used to make radios out of rusted razors, a safety pin (a cat's whisker diode) and a coil of wire (to tune)
http://bizarrelabs.com/foxhole.htm
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
If by "Connections-like" you mean appeals to nerds and involves history of technology, fine, but that is where the similarity ends. That being said, this was worth watching. The Silicon Carbide trick was cool.
Back in the day, Philips had the slogan "Let's make things better". :-)
However, some of my friends working at the Lighting Division changed that to "LED's make things better"
The LED museum was great when the guy running it kept to the history and technology of LEDs. The last few years he "reviews" flashlights and assorted crap. His prose, coupled with the byzantine webdesign, is hardly worth the very few bits of knowledge contained in the site. He had a good thing going, but he blew it.
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.
The Admin and the Engineer
Can we rename it to 'LED-E'?
And in the opening credits, instead of the bouncing lamp dude, we'd have an LED-E himself.
So they didn't go back to the real beginning, which was the publishing by H. J. Round of the discovery that a silicon crystal would emit light when a current was passed through it? The credit for first discovery needs to go to an Englishman, not a Soviet... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._J._Round/