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."

Comments

Re:warning don't try at home!

[Sanat]

When I was a kid we would take a blue blade (old type of razor blade) and a piece of graphite from a lead pencil and by judiciously touching it just right would act as a diode and thus a receiver.

We made a one piece headset from a cardboard tack box and would wrap wire around a form with a small magnet glued inside on one side of the tackbox and the coil glued to the other side.

The first portable radio I ever saw other than the home made variety had small tubes in them and ran on batteries.