The Quest for the Blue LED

Hello, Ed Conway here. I'm Sky News' economics and Data Eeditor and our latest podcast host. and I'm here to give you a wee break from Neil Patterson. So I've briefly taken over the This is Wh podcast feed just this time to tell you about my brand new series It's called stuff Matters. 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 Shuji Nakamura has 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 Shuji wanted to go to Tokyo or Osaka to be a young man in a big city, but His university advisor didn't think that was such a good idea You cannot survive in a big city. Competition is 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 sets him up with a job closer to home at a small chemicals company called Nichia. Nicha Kikarindas 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 bad place Stinks L like a volcano Hm Rotten eggs. Yeah to' so bad. It gets worse. The scientists working at Nichia. all of their clothes. grimy. They're stained, dark, yellow and red becausecause of a particular chemical they're working with Pow. Yeah, I became so nervous the becauseiner is so bad you know. Oh my gosh, this is the achemical 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 Nichure's tiny research and development team Soon, a guy from the sales department tasks them with developing a new product Gallium phosphite crystal used to make green and red LEDs. Should she think it's doable But he needs a special kind of furnace to make the crystal an expensive furnace. Sati soun US thata Shuji's boss thinks he must be joking asking for so much cash My bsays, Oh, are you crazy. My company No money, You crared it. So what's Shudji gonna do? Build his own furnace So I have to make fs myself. Oh Hmade 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 Soti with it Wh the biggest smoke in b. His colleagues rush over to his lab. open the door? They can't see anything, just Suji trying to put out the explosion. They yell to check if he's okay N you are surviving? you are 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 S she 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 going on about this intractable problem, which no one has been able to crack, almost as if it was this mythical, uncatchable creature. L 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. B with me For most of our existence, humanity had only very little control over light And it improved only very slowly four hundred thousand years ago, Neanderthals first got some dry wooden stalks to cash, 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. At 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 fat, and whale oil taking us into the seventeen hundreds But most of those early lights really didn't That is until lectricity 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 lightights. These are tiny diodes, essentially a relative of the silicon chip run a current through an LED Almost all of the energy is turned into light, not heat The problem was for a long time could 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 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? Again make a lot of money. At that time, you know, you jump by like a Sony Tall shipa pases they're spending Wh hundred two hundred million every three or every years? In the seventies and eighties, the quest for a blue LED becomes a global technological arms race You're off the g. None of these armies of scientists were any closer to success Giving Shuji Crazy idea. Araisier even than building his own furnace Hmm. Make a blue LED He starts to Tester, his boss. More is a joke than anything else the answer is the same as always. broke No money. And also, how could a little Japanese chemicals company do this if the world's smartest scientists can't? No brain. So for years, Sudi 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 wanted 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 Size it 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 o so now. so now I have a big dismosphere. Now there are two chemical compounds that 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 sinc 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 I could invent bity, but I could write a paper using Garium light Now this is important because in Japan, if you write five research papers, you can get a PhD. 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 But it's hard even harder than Suji expected any hope of success He needs to produce Perfect translucent Gallium nitroide crystal Every day For six months, he fires up the reactor, but the crystal that comes out is. which is not good. Yeah, teror. pass a year goes by Still Day after day, the crystals Coming 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 better than I. That doesn't matter to Shuji though. What he's thinking is I can write a paper about my incredible progress. Yes, I'm so excited. I can publish paper first time,. 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. Sed. 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? A would have failed. Nobody could make Indiium light But now, tucked in a pine tree forest, unbeknownst to nearly anyone else in the scientific community Shuji is within touching distance one of the greatest achievements in science and technology It's nineteen ninety two. Ye since Shuji started working on this After another adjustment of his reactor Finally, Get 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 Shuji'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 He wants 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 Judji opens the door and That's enough. I told you it was just a sneak preview to listen to the whole thing about how LEDs change the world, about the obscure economist who predicted a century and a half ago, how inventions like this might backfire And even about what this story might teach us about the artificial intelligence boom, well, you'll have to listen to the full thing. And maybe the bonus episode too, which you can get by subscribing and becoming a Sky News insider Search for stuff matters wherever you get your podcasts