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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.
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
I think someone swindled you. They obviously sold you SEDs: Smoke Emitting Diodes. I got taken several times myself as a kid. It took me a while before I figured out how to spot proper components that kept the magic smoke inside.
Be relentless!
Oh god please, don't say they look cool. If one more thing in my house has a blue LED I'm never going to be able to get a night's sleep ever again. The damn things are like portals into a strange neon blue hell.
Electrical tape works wonders, though.
Nonsense! Two atoms walk into a bar. The first says "I think I've lost an electron", and the second replies "Are you sure?", and the first one says "I'm positive"
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I might try this sometime. Should I apply the soldering iron to the LED or the product designer?