Isamu Akasaki, inventor of first efficient blue LED, has died

[anyfoo]

I distinctively remember buying my first blue LED in what must have been the mid-90s. I simply walked into an electronic parts store and bought a single spare LED. I don't think I had ever seen a blue LED in action before, it was completely new to me, so I was very curious.

It was of the very common standard shape and size LEDs were during that time, and its case was colorless but cloudy, not clear. A good thing, because that meant the LED would emit its light along the entire casing, not just straight forward, making it much easier to look at. It also wasn't much brighter than other LEDs, that came later.

When I applied power and saw it shining in that beautiful blue color, I was positively amazed. This was so much cooler and so much more beautiful than the red, green, and yellow LEDs I had been using before. I distinctively remember just leaving it attached to power, sitting on my desk, just for something nice to look at.

[uncledave]

I totally get that. I did exactly the same. Cost £8 at the time if I remember as well which is a hell of a lot of money for an LED. It was just so different to the yellow, red and green ones. I was buying a bit of the future.

But roll on to today and the things are mostly a nuisance In my life. I’ve got one shining at me off my monitor now. If I scoot myself up in my chair a bit it doesn’t annoy me as much. I may stick some tape over it.

Still, RIP Mr Akasaki. Your contribution to the world is a net good one. Without it we probably wouldn’t have white leds :)

[jeffwass]

Very similar story here. I was in undergrad back then and worked in a part-time job with the high energy physics dept (we built front-end detector electronics for particle detectors at CERN, Fermilan, SNO, etc).

One of the guys on our team had great relations with the major electronics distributors and always had well stocked lab. One day, mid 90’s, we saw he got a sample of few of these brand new Blue LED’s.

My coworker and I snuck into his lab after he left and wired one of them up.

It’s hard to describe what it was like to see this bright deep blue compared to only the red, yellow, and green LED’s that existed until that point. It was so cool to look at.

[nerfhammer]

incidentally you can get leds with clear, clouded, or colored+clouded encasings. Only with the latter can you tell what color they are when they're off.

One time I had some red leds in clear encasing in a parallel configuration and they inexplicably would not light up... it turned out one of the leds was actually infrared and it was invisibly on and sucking up all of the voltage

[Scoundreller]

> A good thing, because that meant the LED would emit its light along the entire casing, not just straight forward, making it much easier to look at.

In a pinch, if you don’t want your 5 or 7mm LEDs to be so focussed: carefully take a set of side-cutters and cut the tip off the LED.

[1_player]

Oh man, that takes me back.

I used to love looking into my father's spare electronics cabinet when I was a kid, full of chips and resistors and capacitors. I vividly remember the LED drawer, with a hundred red, green, yellow LEDs he used in almost all of his projects, and just one or two of those opaque, white LEDs which I knew shone blue light, and I've never seen him use, as if they were a rare and prized possession.

I get it now, as the blue LED technology is so much more recent than any other LED technology. They must have been much more expensive than the other ones.

[edoceo]

Oh, I remember when blue LEDs became readily available (late 90s for me) and I would mod all my stuff to blue.

Had this MS ergo keyboard, with the LEDs in the middle hump, came with green. So, I replaced with these 2.5 hi-blues and I was blinded by my own Numlock-Beam. Had to cross a resistor over there to take the edge off.

Anyway, I think HN should get a black-bar because the blue LED is so cool.

[Aardwolf]

I found myself taping over some blue LEDs because they were so bright at night!

[m_mueller]

Worst one for me is on an older pair of Sony's flagship NC headphones. Putting them on at night is like flying a plane with landing lights on, and of course it shines right in the face of my partner.

[gertlex]

I did the same thing to my Dell laptop in college when purple LEDs first became available. And a year or so prior to that (when my google results were still fruitless), I swapped blue LEDs in like you, and got a purple-ish result by putting some pink paper between the LED and the numlock icon (or whichever it was). I was fascinated to find that the paper faded to white after a few weeks as a result.

These days I like yellow, but am lazy and just put kapton tape over the white LEDs on my desktop...

[ericj5]

Do blue LEDs on home electronics bother anyone else at night time as much as it does me? They appear so much brighter to me than other colors

[vidarh]

I have a drawer full of black electrical tape and small round dot stickers almost entirely due to blue leds. Though it's convenient on everything. The electrical tape blocks it out entirely, for the most part. The round stickers let through some light so is great for dimming it down a bit or just use multiple to block it completely.

I think they're so widespread now largely because they were so expensive when they first started becoming common that they were used in expensive equipment, and became a way of making things look higher end.

[grawprog]

I've got a laptop charger with a blue led. It's awful, I have to remember to unplug it at night, even in the other room. I've forgotten before and woke up to use the washroom only to find the whole living room lit up from the little led and I'd feel instantly wide awake.

Contrast that with a USB charger I picked up in an emergency, unaware it had a red led that was on constantly as long as the cord was receiving power, fucking terrible design and I've thankfully replaced it, but it didn't bother me too badly when I had to use it in my room at night. I could still sleep and everything.

[Bishop_]

Yes, I was getting annoyed by an access point I bought that had blue status lights but amazingly it has a setting that turns them off either always or during specified hours. I'm floored that every device doesn't allow you to disable them.

[MrDOS]

I remember a Digikey catalogue c.2002? where it seemed like blue LEDs were the star of the show. Page after page of this new wonder. And then the following decade-long flood of blue-LED-festooned consumer products, where every new bit of kit needed to visually proclaim how new-fangled it was by blasting out that particularly shrill wavelength of visible light.

So cool, but so annoying.

[s0rce]

Yes, I have LightDims (https://www.lightdims.com/) on nearly everything.

[chrisseaton]

> Do blue LEDs on home electronics bother anyone else at night time as much as it does me?

Don't have home electronics in your bedroom is my advice.

[jberryman]

I have a guitar pedal that uses blue and red LEDs to indicate mode. Part of my bedtime ritual is to stomp it to the red mode.

[shoo]

I have an electric kettle that holds water in a vessel with transparent sides. When the kettle is turned on and heating water it illuminates the water with blue LEDs.

It doesn't bother me at night time as the light goes on only when it is in use. But the fact that it has lights at all is bothering.

[grishka]

The one in my humidifier bothered me so much I opened the dang thing and was pleasantly surprised to find the LED on its own tiny board which I then disconnected.

[dorkwood]

There has to be another way of showing an appliance is receiving power which is both visible at night and in broad daylight. The super-bright LED is overkill in anything but the brightest lighting scenario, and makes any room immediately ugly and unpleasant after 6pm.

[glandium]

I have a hard drive enclosure in the bedroom that was too bright to my taste. So much so that I opened it to remove it (which, incidentally, was really easy, it was plugged in the board via a connector, I didn't even need to cut wires or anything)

[mrweasel]

While blue LEDs are wonderful to have, I don’t get why anyone would add them to a product as an indicator.

They are annoying and typically insanely bright. Also, just because something has bluetooth, does mean that a blue LED is legally required.

[sneak]

Overbright indicators of any kind on electronics bother me. The brightest are indeed usually blue, but green and red are also offenders.

[cush]

Yes! I cover them all up with electrical tape or LightDims

[_Microft]

The effect that some people's work eventually has on everyone's life can be just amazing.

In this case it enabled LED lighting for everyone. Transistors (Bardeen, Shockley), lasers or artificial fertilizer (Haber, Bosch) also come into mind.

[kragen]

Agreed. Also, Norman Borlaug (the Green Revolution which prevented, or at least postponed, the famine we'd have been living in for 40 years now, thus saving a billion lives) and Stanislav Petrov (who refused to raise the alarm in 01983 that would have started a global thermonuclear war, thus saving three billion lives).

[samatman]

My personal favorite here is John B. Goodenough for lithium-ion battery chemistry.

What an amazing name!

[s0rce]

The Hall–Héroult process for electrolytic aluminum refining is pretty impactful. Many polymer synthesis processes are also very impactful day to day, starting with Bakelite (less relevant now).

[dehrmann]

Blue LEDs have enabled incredible power savings by making LEDs viable for lighting rooms and screens.

[mhh__]

Peter Mansfield also comes to mind (MRI).

[ampdepolymerase]

A more important question is, how well were they compensated? Most of the value are not captured by the original inventors.

[boredpandas777]

I remember back in 1990 there were no efficient blue LEDs. We were desperately looking for a solid state blue light source to get some chemical to fluoresce and the source had to be small and efficient. The initial SiC diodes which I think came out in 1992-1994 were not powerful enough. Huge progress has been made since then.

[gus_massa]

I remember in ~2000, I went with my wife to buy some LEDs. The price of red, orange, yellow and green was $0.1 each, so we bought 10 of each.

We were very surprised that they also had blue LEDs, so we asked the price and it was $2 each. After some deliberation we only bought only 2 of them.

I'm still surprised when I see a cheap toy or device with a blue or white LED.

[hathawsh]

I agree, fond memories. Today you can get all the popular colors for less than a penny each.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32848810276.html

[karmakaze]

I remember reading the story of the development and breakthrough of the blue semiconductor laser in Scientific American (in print). Looked it up[0], it was Sept '97.

Quite fascinating, it was a holy grail of sorts in that it would lead to higher resolution applications (Blu-ray) as well as round out the RGB to be able to make the range of visible colors. One thing I remember about the article was that it's hard to say 'blue' with a Japanese accent and it comes out 'true baroo'.

Shortly after there were lots of expensive blue LEDs being added to lots of high-end items, including audiophile equipment that two of my family members made (separate brands: one tube, one solid-state).

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/true-blue/

[TedDoesntTalk]

That article mentions blue laser. Is that the same as blue LED?

[kbelder]

Just as important, or even more-so, this allowed efficient controllable multicolor and white LED lights, since we already had red and green LEDs.

[ur-whale]

IIRC, the company he worked for when he discovered / invented the blue LED was - shall we say - not particularly inclined to give him his dues.

[robin_reala]

I think my first blue LED was in the power button of the Playstation 2. Something that made it seem exceptionally futuristic at the time.

[sjwright]

A joke I first saw on Twitter:

  LED status key
  Green - online
  Red   - error
  Amber - busy
  Blue  - modern

(Source: https://twitter.com/deviantollam/status/1345143016307113985 )

[cush]

So he's who I can blame! Just kidding, but in reality I do cover up any and every blue LED that comes in my house. No thank you every electronics manufacturer in existence!

[Goog_l_Dude_l]

For anyone wondering (like I was): Why A Blue LED Is Worth A Nobel Prize (2014) https://www.popsci.com/article/technology/why-blue-led-worth...

[1-6]

I remember when upgrading Nokia 3310’s to Blue LEDs was a thing in Chinatown. People’s phones glowed like something out of the world back then.

[backtoyoujim]

"I gotta get me a blue LED or something because that blue light ... is bad ass."

https://www.theunticket.com/audio/drops/mattmcconbluelight.m...

[mark-r]

I always have trouble with the official story of the blue LED, because I had a 1985 Volkswagen Golf that had a blue LED for the high-beam indicator. It might not have been as bright as today's blue LEDs, but it was bright enough to be useful.

[anorphirith]

I remember reading the article about blue LED's finally being invented, then about a year later I saw my city (Lyon) started using them downtown to light the street markers. I as impressed at the adoption speed

[sneak]

The purple made by mixing blue LEDs with red LEDs (it's a very distinct purple) is my favorite color (after black, of course).

This man made it possible for LED purple to be everywhere.

[junon]

I remember when I saw my first blue LED. It immediately felt like I was in the future, and I remember how bright it was lighting up the entire room in the dark.

[antonzabirko]

Dang covid has killed a lot of brilliant humans. So many obituaries here are from covid