The Breakthrough of Blue LED Technology

How does a banana trigger a CIA backed coup Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order What do LED lights say about the future of humanity I'mt Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow Hello, Ed Conway here. I'm Sky News' economics and Data editor and our latest podcast host. And I am here briefly but very politely butting into the cheat sheets podcast feed to tell you all about my brand new series. It's called Stuff Matters. It's kind of A bit like cheat sheet, but for the world with much less stuff about government bond yields. Sorry, Wolf In each episode, I take an unassuming object from our lives and look beneath the surface to understand what it can tell us about the world around us in unexpected and often quite profound ways. If you like burrowing down into rabbit holes and all sorts of random but honestly totally mind bending topics, well, I think you'll like it and you'll never look at the everyday objects around you quite the same again And here is a little taster of our very first episode about a scientific breakthrough change the world In this case, it's all about how the lights surrounding us have completely changed in the past few years, thanks to one of the most important inventions of the past decades, light emitting diodes Here's a little bit of our episode on LEDs, including an exclusive interview with the Nobel Prize winning scientist who helped invent them. The year is nineteen seventy nine Shuti Nakamura Just finished his electrical engineering degree at a local university in Tokushhima a small Japanese city he grew up in So initially after graduation, I wanted to join a big company like Toshiba, Panonic, Sony. That' of my dream Suji wanted to go to Tokyo or Osaka to be a young man in a big city. His university advisor didn't think that was such a good idea You cannot survive in a big city competition so hard So you have to say here in Tokushima Shuji is basically still just a kid fresh out of Uni, so he listens to his advisor who set him up with a job closer to home at a small chemicals company called Nicha. Nich Ki Carindas At first, it seems like it's a total mistake The chemicals factory, which is outside the city in a pine forest is so pungent, Shuji can barely stand it Sar is is so bast Place stinks like a volcano. H Rotten eggs. yeah to me so bad. It gets worse. The scientists working at the chair. all of their clothes. grimy. They're stained, dark, yellow and red because of a particular chemical they're working with Yeah, I became so nervous that because cer is so bad, you know. Oh my gosh, this is thechemical company This is a million miles away from the career Shuji was dreaming of He doesn't have any decent alternatives, so he learns to breathe through his mouth and joins Nichia's tiny research and development team Soon, a guy from the sales department taskks them with developing a new product Gallium phosphite crystal used to make green and red LEDs. S she thinks it's doable But he needs a special kind of furnace to make the crystal. An expensive furnace ty s US thata Shuji's boss thinks he must be joking, asking for so much cash My boss said, Oh, are you' crazy? My company No money. You' cred. So what's Sudji gonna to do? Build his own furnace So I have to make fs myself. Oh H madeade the actor Suji walks out to the back of the building, where Nicha scientists dump old spare parts of their lab equipment. He picks through the scraps and literally welds them together to make his own reactor Obviously, it's not perfect. There are cracks in the pipes At one point as he experiments to make the crystal, the reactor explodes B on Smoke engulfs the lab and shooty with it. Wh the biggest smoke in b. His colleagues rush over to his lab. they open the door? They can't see anything, just Sui trying to put out the explosion. They yell to check if he's okay N you are surviving? you okay. Nbody came to me and okay, I'm okay, okay. These explosions become a sort of routine bangs every month And in the end, after three years of tinkering with the reactor and firefighting Shuji finally finishes the crystal And lo and behold, it makes the company no money No profit at all Still, Shuji has, at the very least invented a brand new LED crystal, even if no one wants to buy it Over these three years, he spent a lot of his time doing research reading academic papers about LEDs and crystals And he notices something Everyone is going on about this intractable problem, which no one has been able to crack, almost as if it was this mythical, uncatchable creature. Bue. LED Now if we want to see why the blue LED is such a big deal We're going to have to rewind the very beginning of human civilization By with me. For most of our existence, humanity had only very little control O light improved only very slowly four hundred thousand years ago, Neanderthals first got some dry wooden stalks to catch, and we discovered fire And for the first time ever We generated our own light A few hundred thousand years went by And we invented lamps. att first, just hollowed out rocks or skulls with animal fat and then candles. And then, another four thousand years later, oil lamps, burning tallow, animal fats and whale oil taking us into the seventeen hundreds But most of those early lights really dim That is until ity Edison, Tesla and All of a sudden, lights became bright. We put them in cars, on theatre marquis, in the back of fridges when you need a late night snack. We lit up the entire world with them. And thanks to all this light humumanity transformed We could all do more. for longer Way after the sunset There's always been a catch with incandescent light bulbs which is what we call traditional bulbs, a limit And it is that they are very, very Very inefficient Only five to ten percent of the power you run through them actually turns into light. The rest is just wasted on creating heat, which you'll know if you've tried to change a light bulb that's been on for a while That heat wastes an extraordinary amount of money and energy. A massive chunk of the power generated in power stations basically goes into heating light bulbs, not lighting them up But in the nineteen sixties, scientists developed D lights. These are tiny diodes, essentially a relative of the silicon chip run a currerence through an LED. Almost all of the energy is turned into light, not heat The problem was for a long time can only make them red and green anyone developed a blue LED well You'd have the full light spectrum You can make any color, you can make displays or pretty importantly, white lights, using just a fraction of the energy of an incandescent bulb. Inventing a blue LED was easier said than done fact It was a massive long standing scientific challenge Whever could figure that out, would revolutionize humanity's relationship with light? againgain make a lot of money At the time you know, you jump buy like a Sony Tol shaan, they are spending Wh hundred two hundred mill every three or fiveB years? In the seventies and eighties, the quest for a blue LED becomes a global technological arms race. You're off the gear None of these armies of scientists were any closer to success Giving Suji Crazy idea. Ara easier even than building his own furnace H Blue LED He starts to Tester, his boss. More is a joke than anything else the answer is the same as always. broke No m you. And also, how could a little Japanese chemicals company do this if the world's smartest scientists can't? No brain. So for years, Sui is told to work on something else, anythingthing but blue LEDs. Eventually He cracks I became so angry. I can' quit a company anytime also. So before quitting, I wanted to do what I want to do He's going to quit But before he does, he's going ask one Last time He marches into Nicha's founder's office makes us plea Will you let me do blue LED research the founder sided him up and says Okay, no problem? Wow Suji expected to get fired on the spot. he was not expecting a yes. Why the boss's change of heart Chuji thinks it was mostly because of just how doggedly he'd worked for years. The founder thought he might be worth a shot So In the mid eighties gets to work on blue LEDs There are millions of dollars riding on his research And he starts to feel the pressure I cameame so nervous so now I have a big responsibity. Now there are two chemical compounds that make a blue LED. Zinc selenide Gallium nitride going into the science of it all, the key thing you need to know is that Almost every other scientist is working only with the first compound szinc selenide becausecause the other one Gallium nitride was just really hard to form into the crystalline structure you need if you want it to behave like a diode Essentially anyone working with gallium nitride is considered crazy I never expected that I could invent Bity, but I could write a paper using Garium nite. Now this is important because in Japan, if you write five research papers, you can get a PhD. So even if his blue LED project fails, Shuji thinks to himself, well I might at least get a doctorate out of this. So, that's the path he takes It's hard even harder than SXuji expected Any hope of success He needs to produce Perfect translucent gallium nitroide crystal very day For six months, he fires up the reactor, but the crystal that comes out is which is not good. Yeah ter pass a year goes by Still Day after day, the crystals comoming out looking like chunks of dark goo He rebuilds and adjusts the reactor as he's done before And then eventually one afternoon to Shuji's total astonishment Wow, fast a beautiful transparent color He's finally made a translucent gallium nitride crystal He's still nowhere near a workable LED. No, no, no, I spe not. That doesn't matter to Shuji though. What he's thinking is I can write a paper about my incredible progress. Per Yes, I'm so excited. I can publish paper first time know. I never published any paper, so yeah. One paper down Four more to go After two months He improves the properties of his crystal better than anyone else has been able to. L wor. But still, not good enough. S ac. At this stage, Shuji still wasn't expecting he could actually do it Because even after making the perfect crystal There's still one more challenge Adding another element, Indium. which will allow the LED to emit that blue light And Guess what? Everybody they failed. Nobody could make Iiarum right then. But now tucked in a pine tree forest, unbeknownst to nearly anyone else in the scientific community Shuji is within touching distance of one of the greatest achievements in science and technology It's nineteen ninety two. years since Shuji started working on this After another adjustment of his reactor Finally Ss Translucent. Gallium nitride crystal In theory He now has all the parts needed Blue LED. He doesn't let himself get too excited This is still not a big moment Suji's fear is that because of how unreliable gallium nitride is Blue LED might struggle to glow for longer than an hour or so, making it totally useless So He does something called a lifetime test. He lines up ten of his protype blue LEDs in the lab, he switches them on and goes home. to see if the diodes can last through the night The next morning gets to work bright and early as always Seven AM came to the company and I went to my office and immediately got to the lab Sudi opens the door and