Nobel Prize in Physics - Blue LEDs

The Nobel Prize in physics goes to three men who gave us blue light-emitting diodes, used daily in your smartphone screen - Washington Post / Oct 7, 2014

A little "Residential Power and Energy" shout-out to these gentlemen - Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura. When I was cutting my engineering teeth, there were red LEDs, amber LEDs, and green LEDs. But without blue LED's, it's impossible to make white light (red + green + blue) and as a result, low energy LEDs were not useful for things like video images or illumination. They were used quite early for traffic lights (red, amber, green - works out!)

Now, "white light" LEDs, based on this discovery, permeate our world. My smartphone, low power flashlights and lanterns, low power residential lighting. I'm pretty sure there is not a single room in my home that does not use these in some way.

Red, blue, and green light combine to make the bright white produced by LED lightbulbs. Bulbs using blue light-emitting diodes are more efficient and have a longer lifetime than old fashioned bulbs (up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights).

Wonderful to have something so practical, and uniquitous, recognized by the Nobel Committee.