Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED

Veritasium · 57M views · 2024-02-08 · 33:45

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Overview

Veritasium tells the story of how Shuji Nakamura and others made the blue LED, long thought nearly impossible. It covers the materials challenge of gallium nitride and the persistence it took.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as a gripping story of single-minded persistence against the herd, and as the back story behind modern LED lighting.

Recommended by 10 HN people across 7 months · HN mentions 2024–2026

Topics

Semiconductors & chip manufacturing Scientific method & science communication Materials science

What people said

teleforce · 2026-03 · Strong recommendation
>It is absolutely stupid to talk about this as edisons revenge. If Tesla had the modern high power transistors needed to get high voltage dc out of the ac produced from a spinning turbine he would be all for high voltage dc too. This! The soon people realized these facts the better. The pervasive high rise buildings did not happen before the invention of modern cranes. Exactly twenty years ago I was doing a novel research on GaN characterization, and my supervisors made a lot money with consulations around the world, and succesfully founded govt funded start-up company around the technology. Together with SiC, these are the two game changing power devices with wideband semiconductor technology that only maturing recently. Heck, even the Nobel price winning blue LED discovery was made feasible by GaN. Watch the excellent video made by Veritasium for this back story [1]. [1] Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED: [VIDEO]
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waltbosz · 2025-06 · Strong recommendation
I (and my 6-year-old) really enjoyed this video from Veritasium about the invention of the blue LED. [VIDEO]
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Eddy_Viscosity2 · 2026-03 · Recommendation
The guy who figured out how to make a blue LED (which was world changing), also worked every single day . Fascinating story: [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by Veritasium, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

Data and selection notes

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