LED Forty Years Older Than Thought

LED lover writes "The discovery of the LED is usually credited to four US groups in 1962, but an unrecognized Russian genius got there forty years before. Oleg Losev even filed a patent on using his device for long range communications, and wrote to Einstein to ask for help with the theory — but got no reply."

How often does this happen?

[Reverse Gear]

I wonder how many very useful ideas like this one there is lying around right now? Probably quite a few.
According to the conspiracy people things similar to this happen all the time, with the big cooperations making sure that for example things to replace the fossil fuels does never get publicly known, I doubt there is very much truth in this, but this little story might make me think just a little more of the conspiracy theories.
If Einstein didn't react to this, I wonder how many other great discoveries that just perish because no one reacts to them?

I don't blame Einstein, I bet there was a lot of more or less intelligent nut cases who contacted him with all kinds of "great ideas" and "energy machines" all the time, had he been reacting to it all he would probably have had far less time to work on his own theories.

Re:How often does this happen?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I'm as anti-corporation as anybody- but I don't think inventions are supressed on purpose. I actually think it's one of the more inefficient consequences of a free market- where money and brains are very rarely matched together enough to bring products to market fast enough. In fact, as time goes on and the standard of living becomes more expensive, brains and money will become MORE mismatched, not less, as many brilliant inventors are only brilliant for a 30 year window between the ages of 10 and 40 (peaking at 21) and then spend several decades struggling to get their brilliant ideas to market. With the cost of living going up, this will only get worse- as people at the begining of their career earn a lot less than people at the end of their career. The Venture Capital (or Vulture Capital) game can short circuit this somewhat, of course, but the problem is still matching up the old money people with the young inventors when they don't even move in the same social circles.

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Oh, and before anybody points out that this SPECIFIC invention was under Leninist/Stalinist Russia, I don't consider their form of communism to be very different than a free market. In fact, thier version of communism might be considered to be even worse when it comes to this particular property of the free market- a free market with a single Venture Capitalist (the state party chairman) through whom ALL requests for money to develop an invention must go through. The exact opposite would be the form of co

Re:How often does this happen?

[zero_offset]

a free market with a single Venture Capitalist (the state party chairman) through whom ALL requests for money to develop an invention must go through

You have a... "unique" definition of the word "free".

Off-topic

[aztektum]

This thread has made me wonder how "free" our market really is when you consider the following:

Lobbyists buying laws that help their clients reduce outside innovation and competition while weakening an individuals (DMCA).

Or how the courts can be used to hamstring competitors because the government approves vague, bullshit patents (Verizon v. Vonage is the obvious one right now, how many others have been posted here over the years?).

Oh the irony for what has become of a country born of its desire to cast off

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

In a free market, people don't have to go to some venture capitalist or some state party chairman. They are free to go to family, friends, a private bank, or take a mortgage out on their house for funding.

Only if their family & friends are wealthy, their banker is into lending money to small business startups (9 out of 10 fail, remember), or they are stupid enough to want to take a big chance on losing their house. MOST people don't have those advantages in a free market- most people barely make enou

Re:How often does this happen?

[Harmonious Botch]

I'm as pro-corporation as anybody- but I don't think inventions are supressed on purpose, either. One of the beauties of a free market is that brains and money can get matched together so readily. ( Imagine an inventor trying to get a job in some othe part of Stalinist Russia where you had to have the government's permision to move )

It costs more to supress an invention than to market it. Suppose corporation A and corp B are bidding for the proverbial great-invention-by-a-lonely-genius. Corp A wants to develop it, and corp B wants to supress it. Corp A can bid more because they intend to make a profit on it even after development expenses. So their net cost to buy is lower. Also, they get to use the patents on the technology to cut B out of the market.

Re:How often does this happen?

[polar red]

And when corp B has an interest in selling its more expensive, more lucrative invention that predates this invention ? Or what if ALL relevant companies have an interest to use the older technology - like say the oil and car companies have in petrol ?

Dreaming in technicolor

[rumblin'rabbit]

I work for an R&D department in a corporation. When we see a good idea that might cut into the profits of our existing products, do we say "Okay, how can we suppress this?" Never. Such a suggestion would be the height of absurdity. A corporation that tries to fight the tide of innovation is doomed. Whatsmore, no one would want to work for it.

Rather the response is, "how can we exploit this idea to the max" and "how can improve on this idea". If we aren't allowed to exploit the idea, then we ask "how

Re:

[polar red]

Then YOU explain ME WHY there's still NO electric car available in stores? I'll buy one immediatly. I wanna buy an EV1 ! Don't say there isnt a market for it ... Some makes live on less than 5000 cars a year.

Re:Dreaming in technicolor

[DAtkins]

Ummm, actually I don't believe that you would buy one immediately. Why would I question your statement? Because there are already companies that make electric cars [teslamotors.com] and yet you complain that there aren't any.

I could also go into the economics of why one person saying they would buy an electric car doesn't help a society that works off of the principles of mass production, but I would just bore myself to sleep. Rather, I suggest that you (and all of these other people who would like, totally get an electric car, fer sure! could - and I'm just putting it out there - buy an electric car.

Or maybe you want to buy one in a different store, like Wal Mart? In which case, I can highly recommend this high-tech model [fisher-price.com].

Re:

[rumblin'rabbit]

You're proposing that the car makers all got together and said "Okay, let's not make electric cars in any volume so it doesn't cut into our other products"? You've been watching too many Hollywood movies.

Do you really think that a bunch of companies that are normally at each others throats would cooperate in this way? Even one company failing to cooperate would screw it up for everyone. If a company sees a big, juicy market the other companies are ignoring, believe me they'll go for it.

Far more likely

Re:Dreaming in technicolor

[DAtkins]

Hey now, don't give him crap. He just doesn't know how to use google to actually look up the thing he is ranting about. Heck, the very first search page turns up Tesla Motors [teslamotors.com], the REVA [revaindia.com], and freakin' Global Electric Motorcars [gemcar.com], which is a Chrysler company, or even the upcoming Chevy Volt [chevrolet.com].

Maybe he thinks those electric cars suck (it's ok, a lot of other people think that too - but the Roadster and the Volt look pretty cool to me), he'd rather have a electric Civic or something like that. It's too bad there is a conspiracy to keep people from converting their existing cars to electricity. Oh, wait, no there isn't [electroauto.com].

Google is the friend of the ranter... it keeps you from looking retarded.

Re:

[camperdave]

Being from Canada, I have to wonder how any of these vehicles handle snow. Certainly none of them look like they'd be any good for carrying a canoe and a bunch of camping gear up to the lake (although they do look like they'd fit in the canoe). The Reva may be great for bombing around the streets of Calcutta, but it looks like it would be blown off the road the first time a transport truck passed it on the 401.

Re:How often does this happen?

[WED Fan]

I'm not anti-corporation. I love corporations, capitalism, and money. But, one of the main reasons ideas like this get buried is because the person explaining the idea is incapable of explaining it to those who would back him/her. Call it PHB syndrome.

Saw this at HP. Someone comes up with a brilliant piece of technology. It goes nowhere. Two years later, another person with some added marketing ability comes up with the same idea and it takes off. Then the first person says, "But, I came up with that, here are the drawings and emails." Sure enough, he did, but it was so misunderstood at the time that nobody could grasp the idea.

Also, placing yourself in a good position to be heard helps. One guy at HP was a world class crackpot. For every good idea he had, he was flooding his managers with 100 ideas that ran the gamout from Rube Goldberg, conspiracies, implementation prohibitive schemes to down-right illegal-by-the-laws-of-physics-and-animal-husbandr y. Needless to say, he was ignored most of the time.

Re:

[WED Fan]

Read the parent, he started his by saying that was he tended to anti-corporation. His was a response to the "conspiracy theory" angles mentioned before his. Sometimes a good thread history is order.

Re:How often does this happen?

[Brandybuck]

I actually think it's one of the more inefficient consequences of a free market- where money and brains are very rarely matched together enough to bring products to market fast enough.

Do you really think government control can match money and brains any better? We can barely get politicians smart enough to wipe their own asses, but you want to turn over the economy to them? Hah! The free market may not be an inefficient allocator of goods, but it runs rings around any other system that's been tried.

Re:

[The_REAL_DZA]

Do you really think government control can match money and brains any better?

No, in fact they're doing a better-than-decent job of separating me from my money (not that I'm all that brainy, but still...)

Re:

[Brandybuck]

Let me clarify a bit. The problem most people have with the free market is that they think it is a system. It is not a system, it is the lack (or relative lack) of a system. The free market is merely an economy with a relative lack of government interventions and controls. Every other "system" requires the hand of government. Planning committees, bureaucratic trade agreement agencies, and various sorts of economic czars and their police enforcement arms.

Every non free-market solution requires the hand of go

Re:

[zippthorne]

It is also commonly misunderstood. You cannot have a command economy. It is impossible. The free market and its invisible hand are always present, no matter what you do, except on very small scales. The best you can ever hope to do is influence the costs somewhat, and drive the free market in the direction you'd like, but even here, the free market is better than the internet at routing around damage, and you might just end up driving the free market in a direction precisely contrary to your intentions.

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Do you really think government control can match money and brains any better?

Only if anonymity was illegal and that government control was a nearly omnipresent artificial intelligence programmed to treat everybody equally :-).

We can barely get politicians smart enough to wipe their own asses, but you want to turn over the economy to them?

A government doesn't need to be made up of human politicians.

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Sorry, I think you are a fool. There is no way to get around that people are people.

Not all people are people. I should know- I'm one of the 1/186 people who aren't. Autism is considered a defect by the rest of you- but I know better. My lack of empathy allows me to see things in a VERY different way- and not take stupid emotions like greed into account. We're already superior to you NTs who lie, cheat, and steal.

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Isn't it your theory that people should isolate themselves in communities of 500 and not benefit from each others work (ban trade of services and goods)?

One of many theories- I don't pretend to know which is correct. The one I'm working on now is the "pool resources to buy a commune" theory.

And yeah exchanging ideas is a form of service trade, taking away jobs from LED inventors.

Yes it is. I didn't say that the inefficency is neccessarily bad, just inefficient.

Re:

[dattaway]

I wouldn't call LED's an invention. Light emitted by a diode is a common side effect, usually undesirable. Glass diodes have a problem if exposed to light, will generate a voltage like a solar cell. This is bad in audio and RF circuits when you want minimal noise.

Open up a transistor or diode and you can get a few hundred millivolts off the surface. Some diode junctions will transmit a red or infrared light.

Re:How often does this happen?

[Waffle Iron]

Light emitted by a diode is a common side effect, usually undesirable.

While using a glass diode in my 150-in-1 kit, I independently discovered bright white LEDs about 30 years ago. The only problem is that the light only lasted about 1/2 second, and then it was followed by a little puff of smoke.

Re:How often does this happen?

[Bastard of Subhumani]

Looks like you invented the SED [wikipedia.org]. Did you patent it?

Re:

[hcdejong]

Pfft. Any material (semiconductor or otherwise) can be made to emit smoke. It's just a matter of applying enough power.

Re:

[green1]

the tricky part is getting the smoke back in to the item ;)

Re:

[dattaway]

I found that reverse biasing a LED with a higher voltage (with resistor, of course,) say 12 volts, they will give out a soft, white light.

Re:

[The_REAL_DZA]

You invented SED's (smoke-emitting-diodes) 30 years ago and didn't tell anybody?!?!

Re:

[smellsofbikes]

The company I work for is making controllable-color LED's (by making tricolor LED drivers.) We have a sayings: any cheap LED can be a white LED... for a tenth of a second.

Re:

[smithmc]

  I don't blame Einstein, I bet there was a lot of more or less intelligent nut cases who contacted him with all kinds of "great ideas" and "energy machines" all the time, had he been reacting to it all he would probably have had far less time to work on his own theories.

Besides, Einstein was a physicist, not an engineer. Perhaps he should have been talking to Norbert Wiener, or Vannevar Bush, if he were interested in applications.

Re:

[cluckshot]

I wonder how many very useful ideas like this one there is lying around right now?

The short answer is a new one every day!

Working on the energy problem I have become aware every day how things can be known and yet nothing done about them. I know of 11 technologies that all work quite well and all of them produce energy without fuel. It is like pulling teeth and as popular as do it yourself root canal work to get investors to pony up to get any work done. Then come the "Physics Police." These are people

Re:

[Johnboi Waltune]

With all due respect, making baseless claims about what "you know of" doesn't have the power to compel. You should back up your claims of fuelless electricity-generating devices and electric motor designs with enough evidence that someone could look at it and decide for themselves whether or not to agree with you.

Re:

[pclminion]

By 1927, Einstein's interest in quantum mechanics was strongly waning. It was during this general time period that he developed his rather militant views on the interpretations of quantum collapse and uttered the famous quote "God does not play dice." His work on general relativity was coming strongly to the forefront as physicists started to apply its mathematical principles in earnest to a wide range of problems. The search for a grand unified theory of all forces would essentially consume the remainder o

At least he got his name in the story

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike "some Indian guy"

What's next.. ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess,
the first man in space was Russian as well...

Re:

[Tumbleweed]

Let me guess,
the first man in space was Russian as well...

It's not so easy as all that! You can't just willy-nilly put some guy into space. First they'd have to put up some type of artificial 'satellite' type object, along the lines of the idea by that sci-fi writer Clarke, though I dunno, it seems like a pretty far-out idea. But, if they can get that to work, they should send up an animal, perhaps a monkey, or, I dunno, a dog or something. One thing's for sure - any space explorer, or 'cosmonaut' for lack

Doesn't matter

[Apocalypse111]

It doesn't matter how old the LED gets, if you ask it it will always tell you its 40.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

My LED says it is 12:00.

Henry Round the real inventor?

[whoever57]

Zheludev also points out notes that Henry Round, an assitant to radio pioneer Marconi, was the first to discover that semiconductors could produce light, some hundred years ago. He published only a very short note on the matter and made no further investigations. The piece was never seen by Losev, who must be retrospectively declared the inventor of the LED.

Why should not Henry Round be declared the inventor? Also, how on earth can we know that Losev did not see Round's note?

Re:Henry Round the real inventor?

[laejoh]

He published only a very short note

something like: I discovered that semiconductors can produce light, I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain?

Re:

[iabervon]

Presumably, he didn't actually make a semiconductor device whose stated purpose was to emit light, but just considered it a side effect of certain configurations. Vacuum tubes emit light as a side effect when overloaded, but this is undesirable most of the time. He probably didn't realize that the light emission from semiconductors could be useful.

Re:

[billdar]

He probably didn't realize that the light emission from semiconductors could be useful.

How is this modded insightful? I'll grant that this may have been true at first, but TFA goes on to say:

Most significantly, in 1927 Losev filed a patent for a 'light relay' that used his devices 'for fast telegraphic and telephone communication, transmission of images and other applications...'

It sounds like he found a couple applications where it could indeed be useful...

Re:

[billdar]

Heh, posting advice from an AC... But I was wrong, as others pointed out, and give full credit to the moderators for seeing the thread progression that I missed. -Bill

Re:

[ncc74656]

Vacuum tubes emit light as a side effect when overloaded

Some of them throw off plenty of light even in their normal operation. Consider gas rectifiers and voltage regulators as examples, or many directly-heated tubes. The 80 [alfter.us] in my tube tester lights up almost like a lightbulb (this page [jt30.com] says the filament pulls 10W, which is more than your average nightlight).

Re:

[number11]

Vacuum tubes ALWAYS emit light when working, because of they way they are built.

Only if they have glass envelopes. There are plenty of vacuum tubes that had metal envelopes (as mentioned in the very same reference you gave), and they emit nothing but heat. Metal tubes were often seen in '40s-'50s auto radios and in the cheap "All American 5" AC/DC sets, and are still common in high-power applications.

Big difference between theory and building

[Anonymous Coward]

LEDs are not older than we thought. LEDs were built when theory was turned into reality by those that get proper credit for those accomplishments. Sounds like the concept behind LEDs may be 40 years older, and props to Losev, but he didn't make any.

Re:

[bcattwoo]

He actually did make LEDs and measured some of the properties of them. He then used Einstein's theories to explain his observations. Not purely theoretical in the least. What he did is explained a little more fully here [soton.ac.uk] (pdf warning).

Re:Big difference between theory and building

[SydShamino]

You got it backwards. He made the devices and came up with applications, but he couldn't do the theory. That's why he tried to get Einstein's help.

That sort of thing happens frequently. An experimental physicist or engineer notices a phenomena in the lab, can reproduce it, and can think of uses for it. He or she can't however, mathematically prove why it happens. Then, a theoretical physicist (probably working at the same company or university) comes up with a mathematical model to explain the phenomena. Together, they file for and receive a patent.

However, the patent process doesn't require mathematical proof to patent something, so Losev seems to have met all the requirements to patent a new invention.

Let's call them

[ackthpt]

OL-LEDs, in his honour.

Patents

[iamacat]

I know those probably expired already, but any currently active patents claiming any part of that invention should be promptly invalidates. Fair is fair - nobody should be getting royalties for something they didn't invent.

Re:

[ResidntGeek]

From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Invent [reference.com]:

invent
1.to originate or create as a product of one's own ingenuity, experimentation, or contrivance: to invent the telegraph.

The groups that invented them in '62 definitely created LEDs as a product of their own ingenuity, experimentation, and contrivance.

Re:

[iamacat]

In which case, if I can reproduce their scientific work independently, I should be awarded a patent of my own. Ditto for single click, RSA, MP3...

Re:Patents

[ResidntGeek]

If the inventor of MP3 had worked away from the audio encoding community and had not been published nor contributed to audio encoding technologies in any way, and you had reproduced the essentials of the work independently, you would and should have been granted a patent, yes. You'd have made a very important contribution to the world through your own work, a contribution which did not and would not have happened from the work of the earlier inventor, and your invention would have been protecte for a time. That's the way it's supposed to work.

Re:

[iamacat]

I didn't read any of the MP3 patents, but I see that they are not making their work available to the important open source community. So, I am going to invite a bunch of people to compare uncompressed vs compressed music and independently develop an algorithm to strip off waveforms that don't seem to matter as much as others. This algorithm may or may not share some concepts with MP3. But, according to you, I should get a patent for it anyway. After all, I made a very important contribution to the world thr

Re:

[ResidntGeek]

There's no reason an inventor has to make his inventions available to the "open source community". That's the sort of thing a patent allows you to restrict if you wish. And if your algorithm is really different and better than MP3, you're perfectly correct about your contribution and are indeed deserving of a patent, with which you can release your work to the open source community. But if you just independently reinvent MP3, you've made no contribution to the knowledge and/or technological progress of the

Re:

[iamacat]

There is no reason an inventor has to make his inventions available to anyone. Weather it's a desired attribute of society or not, current system allows one to refuse license or demand outrageous royalties. Personally, I would prefer inventors to only publish end result their invention and make full text available when someone agrees to license the work or use it only for exempt purposes such as research. This way, if I don't think your invention is valuable enough to license on your terms, I have an option

Re:

[ResidntGeek]

Why exactly single out commercial development as valuable to society and discount the value of releasing work to public domain?

I don't. Any action that makes it available to the world furthers technological growth. Unless, of course, the patent lasts too long, which is a legitimate problem. I think the problem with your attitude is in "I have an option of doing the work myself." The work of inventing is far greater than the work needed to manufacture, and reproducing it would generally lead to a different

Re:

[iamacat]

I am just asking for fairness. If someone currently has a patent that covers work done by that Russian dude, and they are allowed to keep it, I should be able to do the same if I independently re-invent some technology developed by a big company. I don't see why their contribution to the society - commercial development, should somehow give them a higher status than an open source author who enables, among other things, commercial development by anyone.

Re:

[ResidntGeek]

The difference is that the Russian dude didn't contribute anything to society, while the people who were granted patents did. If a big company employs someone who invents something wonderful that helps society (or an open-source author invents something wonderful that helps society), there's no reason you should be able to take away his glory just because you made the same thing without realizing it. His invention had already (presumably) bettered the world, and your "me too!" would add nothing.

Re:

[iamacat]

In this case, lets hand over licensing inventions to USPTO that will decide how an invention benefits society and turn over licensing proceeds to the author. Because with current system, it's noone else's business on what the inventor does with his brainchild. Perhaps some inventions (tax evasion schemes for example) are the most beneficial if you keep everyone from using them.

Re:

[pushing-robot]

Even if he had created working prototypes, LEDs vary widely from each other. It's taken decades and millions (billions?) of dollars to produce the current spectrum of LEDs out of a wide range of chemicals and substrates. All that research didn't "invent" anything?

It's like saying that you shouldn't be able to patent a jet engine because somebody figured out how to turn fuel into mechanical energy before.

Re:

[iamacat]

Well, I sure shouldn't be able to patent the concept of turning fuel into mechanical energy.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Einstein's Quantum Theory?

[jonnythan]

Nope.

Einstein *did* develop the quantum theory in question. He got his Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect.

Lightbulb!

[Liquidscript]

So LEDs precede thought? No wonder people always draw light bulbs over people's heads when they get an idea.

Transistor?

[Mr. Underbridge]

How about the possibility he may have also invented the transistor? As mentioned in the article, I don't know what else a triode would be.

Semiconductor amplifiers predate transistors

[EmbeddedJanitor]

It is thought by most that transistors were the first semiconductor amplifiers (ie. device that can give gain). That is not true. Iron pyrites negative tunnel diodes were built in the 1920s http://home.earthlink.net/~lenyr/iposc.htm [earthlink.net]. Esaki got the Nobel Prize for discovering tunnelling in 1973, almost 50 years later http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_diode [wikipedia.org]

In Soviet Russia...

[rodney dill]

... The LED lights you up.

Re:

[brian.gunderson]

I'm amazed it took so long for that post.

Re:

[alienmole]

I know, I only visited this thread to see the sheer mass of In Soviet Russia jokes and the people complaining about them. Imagine my disappointment.

Apparently, when the article is actually set in Soviet Russia, it takes all the sport out of it.

University academics

[Toffins]

University academics, especially prominent scientists, often tend to discard letters and emails discussing or querying scientific concepts and experimental results if the communication comes from a stranger who does not have an affiliation to any recognized research organization. This is often due to lack of time or a desire not to get involved in "crackpot" theories. It can also unfortunately be due to academic snobbery.

Russians invent everything.

[Grashnak]

Those of you who remember the good old cold war days will recall that the Soviets can be credited with inventing the LED, television, ramen noodles, california rolls, snow tires, the hanging curveball, and pants.

Re:Russians invent everything.

[sehlat]

I seem to remember there was a line about this in Tolstoy's "Hamlet."

Re:

[FooAtWFU]

No, no, you're getting Hamlet confused with Animal Farm. I know they're both about pigs, but so is Charlotte's Web!

But did he MAKE one, yes or no?

[poliopteragriseoapte]

But did the guy actually build a LED? Because we are all good at writing a fuzzy description of how something should produce light (maybe with the help of wobbly math). Quite another feat is to actually produce the device. Oh, and patents don't matter. Anybody with time and money to burn can file one.

So...

[thedeadswiss]

So, we were misLED...

Zheludev's paper

[Toffins]

Link to the Zheludev paper:

Zheludev, N.I. The life and times of the LED - a 100-year history. Nature Photonics 1(4), 189-192 (2007) pdf file (1.7MB) [nanophotonics.org.uk]

Another Russian

[kidcharles]

Here's another Russian who was ahead of his time [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[slashbob22]

I have heard good things about Rasputin as well.

It's kind of sweet and sad, really.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I could imagine Losev (four letters away from Loser) coming up with an obvious and brilliant idea. And he sits there and thinks - "This is SUCH A GREAT IDEA! I must contact the greatest mind in physics and see if he can confirm this great idea and perhaps GREAT THINGS will happen of it! Excellent!"

So he thinks - who is the greatest mind in physics? He asks his wife, Tonya -

"Olga, darling, I think I will contact EINSTEIN about my great glowing semiconductor idea!"

Olga replies, "Sure honey. He's really smart. And well connected, especially since they've been confirming his ideas left and right. sounds good to me!"

So, with great pride and hope, Losev licks the stamp on the letter and walks down the street to set it off. He holds it to his heart before he puts it in the post box, and makes a small hope that Einstein will see the beauty of his idea and help him, then with finality and hope, he puts the letter in the box.

Then he and Olga went to go boil some rats for dinner, because Russia in 1922 was a freakin' mess.

RS

Re:

[ThisNukes4u]

LOL. I haven't laughed that hard in a while.

Just great. Thanks a lot.

[jpellino]

So those LEDs that were supposed to have 11 year life spans are now going to wink out any minu

Prior art

[Junior J. Junior III]

Ancient greeks used a steam-powered LED technology, but it was regarded at the time as a mere toy.

inventions

[polar red]

I have multiple times already heard of inventions been invented twice or more independently. Does this mean that new technology gets to be invented anyway ? And that it probably depends on the rest of the state of technology and science ? And while i am at it ... if I continue to reason, this means that any invention shouldn't be patentable, because society/history has a hand in it, because the inventor couldn't invent the new tech without being raised, fed, clothed, sheltered and educated by society ? Is t

Anyone know Russian? ru.wikipedia.com needs help

[davidwr]

There's a brand-spanking-new Wikipedia article on him but nothing in the [wikipedia.org] Russian Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for " " or " ."

This article [ioffe.ru] is in Russian and is a good place to start. Here's the English [altavista.com] translation, which comes out as "Oleg Vladimirovich losev - pioneer of the semiconductor electronics (to the century from the birthday)."

1922 Diode == 2 electrode Vacuum tube

[K-Man]

In 1922 diodes were vacuum tubes with two wires in them, one of them heated and capable of emitting electrons to pass a current. What he seems to have discovered is an inverse photoelectric effect, where electrons emit light when striking a metal target.

Although, come to think of it, there were Germanium diodes at the time, so it could have been something more semiconductor-related, but the article isn't clear.

Obligatory Star Trek Quote

[mattt79]

Chekov: Everybody knows the LED was invented by a little old lady in Leningrad.

What about the LEEPROM?

[onemorechip]

Somebody in one of my college labs plugged an erasable programmable ROM (the kind with the clear window over the die for the UV erasure; who remembers those?) into its socket backwards, reversing power and ground, thereby inventing the light-emitting EPROM. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a one-time use device.

Re:

[camperslo]

I was once given a batch of defective radio frequency power transistors. Many had base-emitter shorts. On breaking off the top of the case I saw that they had multiple emitter sites (something to help even the current distribution and avoid a sort of localized thermal runaway where one part of a chip hogs the current). I thought maybe I could connect a power supply and blow-out the short, leaving the rest of the sites functional. It worked. I first tried it on a device with the chip exposed. I was sur

Don't believe this

[Laaserboy]

I have a Ph.D. in semiconductor physics. I worked in one of the labs mentioned in the article. I have to tell you that the description in Nature is really inaccurate. What the Russian likely did is luminesce off a trap in SiC, not off the full bandgap. SiC is not even a direct-bandgap crystal. Yes, it produces blue-green light. It is a point-contact diode, but it is NOT an LED. Nothing practical or useful existed until Nick Holonyak made the first visible LED, then the first visible LED laser a few months later. Bob Hall made the first LED laser. There were a bunch of guys with Ge infrared-emitting diodes before 1962, but history forgets these guys rightly. Both the SiC and Ge diodes are such poor light emitters, that they should not be considered LEDs. Another interesting moment I believe was in the 1960s. Researchers in America claimed to have a working, continuous, non-pulsed room temperature SiC laser. It looked like beautiful blue laser light, but it was a big bust. It was not a laser. Just like this Russian, there was nothing useful going on in SiC.

In Soviet Russia

[codeButcher]

.... patents file you!

Re:

[vrmlguy]

I misread the previous title, "Bethesda Investigates Shivering Isles Bug". I thought it referred to Bethesda Hospital investigating a new tropical disease.

Re:

[Cheapy]

How did you pull that off?

Re:

[Lemmy Caution]

Sometimes, one forgets the historical context of all these events. The siege of Leningrad [wikipedia.org], for example. That his research really got under way in the early, progressive years of the USSR (the period of constructivist art, experimental theatre, open research, etc.) During dynamic periods of history like that, I often wonder how scientists, artists and such get funding and support, keep producing, etc.

Re:

[hcdejong]

So that's the first OLED. Truly, there's nothing new under the sun.

Re:

[K-Man]

Finally, a use for overripe kimchi. The smell would be no worse than stir-frying.

Re:

[VON-MAN]

Well, FTA:

Losev also published on his discoveries in German and British journals. In sixteen papers between 1924 and 1930 he comprehensively detailed the function of his LED.

Re:

[evalhalla]

High tech, complex invertions that don't obviously benefit "The Industry" can pretty predictably be expected to languish in circumstances like ours.

How many american inventors have died poor, because they were ahead of their times, while their creations are still important today?

Not to speak of scientific research, whose results ofter start to be profitable decades or even centuries after the developement of a theory.