Not your typical HERO story . . .

[JW Insider]

This story is about a fairly unknown R&D engineer at a Japanese company. 

So naturally, I'll start off by somehow making this about myself. Just kidding. I'll make it about my father. Just kidding . . .well, almost.

From 1964 to 1984 my father ran a couple of electronics labs for the University of Missouri. This was great fun for him and even more fun for me and my brother. The world was transferring from tubes to transistors, and my father invented a "semiconductor curve tracer" onto a simple oscilloscope screen that made testing transistors as easy or even easier than the old ways of testing vacuum tubes. The University got a patent for it. 

And from 1984 to 2004 he designed amplifiers and sound systems for a company in California, and also for several Assembly Halls. I had fun with the electronics stuff, but never really learned it very deeply. Mostly because I quit school when I was 15 to start regular pioneering, and then I went off to Bethel to draw pictures for the publications and then do library research. But my brother was a few years older than I was, and graduated HS and went into an electronics company immediately. He went to Bethel just after I did and he was assigned electronics projects and had a little research lab which was a mini version of what my father had. 

In the 1990's My father was always going on about how they make transistors and spoke about gallium arsenide "doping," silicon "doping" and other terms I had never heard of. In the mid-1990's a company sent him some blue LEDs. He said even one small one cost a few hundred dollars. Blue LEDs were a kind of "holy grail" of LEDs. If one could be made with the same brightness control and at the same cost of Green and Yellow LEDs, then any color could be mixed. (With paint and ink you can create almost any color by mixing red/magenta, yellow, and blue/cyan -- but with light you can only get any color by mixing red, yellow, and green.) My father used to try to fake the blue by putting a blue transparent plastic cap on a bright red/green combination, because red+green=yellow, and a blue cap would then make a blue-green color, but not bright enough or "true" enough to mix well with the other colors.

Anyway that brings me to the video of the blue LED hero. The story would also make a great story of a working-man hero standing up against the stronger and more monied corporate powers. Someone has probably made a book about him, or they should. 

 

[JW Insider]

What I like about the video is that it not only tells us about the engineer himself, but also has some of the best, easy-to-follow diagrams that teach about the engineering process and the actual physics of the designs:

 

[xero]

• Blue LEDs: Born from gallium, nitrogen, indium.
• Light through electroluminescence; electrons meet holes, birth photons.
• Gallium Nitride (GaN), wide band gap, emits blue.
• Indium Gallium Nitride (InGaN), mix alters hue.
• Early '90s, a breakthrough; high-brightness, efficient.
• Akasaki, Amano, Nakamura: Pioneers, Nobel laureates.
• Blue to white, with phosphor; illumination revolutionized.
• Hard materials tamed, blue light mastered.

[Pudgy]

“Transparent Aluminum” was a fictional material introduced in the movie “Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home”, which formula (at that time was also fictional), traded for some large plexiglass sheets to make a whale carrier.

Transparent aluminum, today, also known as aluminum oxynitride (AlON), is made through a process called hot isostatic pressing (HIP). In this process, aluminum oxide (alumina) powder is subjected to high temperature and pressure in the presence of nitrogen gas. This causes the aluminum oxide to react with nitrogen, forming aluminum oxynitride, which has transparent properties. The resulting material is then cooled and shaped into the desired form. Transparent aluminum is valued for its high strength, transparency, and resistance to damage from extreme environments.