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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.
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
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"
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.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
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
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.
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.
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