Nobel prize for blue

Quite a reasonable question:

I too would think that the original inventor should have been honoured, not just some fine-tuners along the way...

John :-#(#

No, and he's pissed.

H. J. Round discovered electroluminescence with silicon carbide in 1907. No practical use was found.

I'm sure the when committee evaluated wrist watches and calculators with red-led displays, they realized red LED's had no practical use.

The most important part of the Nobel Prize is the banquet. The most important aspect of the banquet is the color of the lighting. Blue was what they'd been missing.

Dr. Roland Haitz deserves the prize. His law made it mandatory to double the light output of LED's every 36 months.

If anyone still believes the Nobel Prize committee knows *anything* about prize-worthiness after Obama snagged a peace prize, then they deserve a Nobel prize for gullibility. The (A)cademy of (S)wedish (S)cience is still apologizing for Alf's unleashing dynamite on the world.

FWIW, a Russian really invented the LED in 1942.

Fair point, certainly wrt yellow or green or orange but blue was the key to getting to white LED-light, a quantum leap ;-)

This is a repair question?

They are judging on impact. The LED was around for some years, expensive and a lab curiosity, and then in the early seventies we were able to buy them as surplus. Not very bright, but even about the same time as we could get red LEDs cheap, there were green and orange and yellow. A neat thing, but they weren't a radical change. Anything you could do with LEDs could be done with incandescent light bulbs. Lots of things get invented, and don't win a Nobel Prize.

And the decades went by, finally a blue LED. That was neat, started all kinds of talk about RGB LEDs to make tv sets or other displays. I remember how bright those blue ones were even when they'd filtered down to the hobby market. Suddenly, you could use LEDs as flashlights, if you could live with blue. I don't know if they affected what had come before, but suddenly you could also get easily high light output red LEDs.

It's worth pointing out that it took a long time for blue LEDs to come along because it wasn't a matter of minor changes to LEDs to get differetn colors (or at least not after the initial orange/green/yellow), but a different process. It was a case of having to start from scratch.

And then not that much later, white LEDs, as someone pointed out, they happened because blue were available and were the foundation of white LEDs.

So suddenly we could have flashlights that were "normal" light, and no more flashlights that didn't work when they were needed because the filament broke.

And a whole lot more development happened as a result. There was limited use for high light output red or green LEDs, but a lot of use for high output white LEDs. Whole different design, not the packaged LEDs as we know it, but a different package so the LED could be heatsinked and they didn't need the lens in the package to get more light output (or direct the light). So no more need for that long extension cord when you need that trouble light, this thing is bright enough to temporarily blind you if you look at it suddenly in the dark.

Wham, no more CFL bulbs in monitors, just white LEDs for the backlight, longer life and probably lower current drain.

And then LED bulbs to replace incandescent and more recently CFL bulbs. They seem to work better than the CFLs, but they certainly use less current for the same light output as incandescent. So that will impact on things in the long run, lower demands for electricity in the home, or in places where there really isn't electricity, real electric lighting that can be powered off a battery and solar cells to recharge it.

They are looking at the big picture.

Michael

There was a lot more to it than just "try many combinations". Here is a link to a story that tells why blue the blue LED was a real break through.

Bill

Yes, it took a long time to find blue. When were LEDs invented? By the late sixties, at least, and maybe early sixties, taking some time to come to production. Blue arrived in the mid or late eighties. So even if they were just trying everything at random, that's a long time to find something that did go blue.

Michael

The interview I read was with Nick Holonyak who made the first visible red LED. I think the key scientific breakthrough came earlier with the GaAs in frared LED which showed the importance of the direct band gap and the use o f III-V compound semiconductors.

The peace prize is awarded by the Norwegian parliament. It's a political prize, nothing to do with science.

or peace.

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No, not a quantum leap. Certainly not compared to the initial LED.

?-)

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Well, sort of. The Nobel is a political award, as evidenced by giving one to Yassir Arafat an aging ex-terrorist. The blue improvement was incremental compared to making LEDs the first time. Also just look at what body controls the awards.

?-)