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The blue LED was supposed to be impossible—until a young engineer proposed a moonshot idea.

  • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29·
    5 months ago

    If it was so hard to make the first one that hundreds of researchers couldn’t do it for years… then how is it so cheap and easy to do today?

    • smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      I don’t get the dislikes, it is a great question. But as someone above, I think the cost was to dicover a way to make blue LED at all and make it scalable, then it’s just like any other product.

      • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        Thanks - and yeah I absolutely pre-suppose that much. I was just hoping for a more specific answer. There could be just as interesting of a story about how it went from prototype —> ubiquity. I personally don’t just wave that process off and say “meh economies of scale.” Production scaling is often quite innovative too. And many lab innovations die on the vine because they can’t cross this chasm. So the fact that this one could, after being such a holy grail for so long, is something I would love to understand more.