How the Blue LED Was Invented, and the God of Staying Up Late

Hi everyone, welcome to Cold-Knowledge Blind Box. This episode is about how the blue LED was hammered into existence. Without blue light, there's no three primary colors, and without those, none of the screens that keep us up late would exist.

The story of Nakamura Shuji is very interesting.

How do you sum up this "almost magical" invention of his?

There's a famous picture online:

Red LEDs are easy. Green LEDs are easy. Blue LEDs are "almost impossible."

Have you ever wondered about this?

Why do we have so many lights and so many monitors today, and how did they become possible?

LEDs were invented in the 1950s. So why didn't we leap straight from then to today, with LED big screens and LED lightbulbs everywhere?

This story is really about the blue LED.

Because we all know that light has three primary colors:

If you want to make white light, and white light is the most natural kind, then you have to collect all three primary colors and mix them together. The white in the middle is the one that actually means something.

If we could only make a red LED and a green LED, and maybe with effort a yellow LED, but never a blue one, then we could never "collect all the dragon balls" and gather that white light.

Without white light, all those LED lights and LED displays we depend on would be just talk.

But the road to finding the blue LED was full of twists and turns.

Hey, when I was filming my main channel, there was a little light in the background. Not sure if you recognize it. That light is called a "glow lamp."

That is the strange path humanity took when it was at the point of despair with LEDs, when it seemed hopeless.

Who made glow lamps big?

The Soviets did.

If you look at old Soviet videos, like the ones from Chernobyl, they all had timers, and their computers all had glow displays flickering on them.

Right, so they thought, "LEDs can't do this, a blue LED is impossible to make, so let's try something else." They used the principle of "cathodoluminescence," the glow of those tubes, to fill in the gap.

So the Soviets used a lot of these.

But why did this technology eventually get phased out?

Because the "blue LED" suddenly got made!

Our "dragon balls" were finally collected all at once, and we entered this huge "age of staying up late" with LEDs.

But the mysterious Japanese man who made the blue LED, Nakamura Shuji, came from a small provincial company in Japan called Nichia Chemical.

After making such a world-changing invention, the company only gave him a bonus of 20,000 yen, roughly over a thousand yuan. That's the whole story.

Okay, let's go back to Nakamura Shuji and talk about how he actually made the blue LED.

Let's start with a very typical story from his childhood:

He was a kid who did terribly in school and terribly in sports, the kind of child who was always much slower than everyone else, who was "bad at everything."

But his older brother forced him to join the school volleyball team.

Once he joined the volleyball team, people finally saw what kind of person Nakamura Shuji was:

He was loyal to his friends, and he was extremely good at making connections with people.

How far did it go?

This guy, who was terrible at sports and terrible at studying, was always the "class representative" in primary school.

Why?

Because all the people on the volleyball team, and all his classmates who knew him, always voted for him.

He was simply someone who "got along with everyone."

This person should have become a politician or a leader. But what happened?

This guy's dream had nothing to do with that. Interpersonal relationships came to him as instinct, and he simply didn't care about them.

What did he love?

He loved Astro Boy.

In Astro Boy, there's that "Professor Ochanomizu," right?

His dream was to become "Professor Ochanomizu"!

Such a streetwise guy, and yet he wanted to become a "physicist." That was his dream.

What a strange person.

As this strange guy kept growing, by the time he reached high school, his grades got a little better, and he got into one of the school's "part-time classes."

There were forty people in this class, and he was always somewhere around "38th or 39th."

His teacher said to him:

"Nakamura, you still need to study hard. If you want to get into a good university, you should quit that volleyball club. Go all-in for one last push and you can get into university."

But Nakamura said with great conviction to his teacher:

—Here we can see his personality again—

"I can't quit the volleyball team!

If I quit the volleyball team, our school's volleyball will be even worse. It'll 'flash yellow' and 'flash marry' (slang), and I'd be letting my brothers down.

Even if we never place, even if our volleyball team is always bad, I will never leave it!"

What a person with real leadership quality.

And sure enough, after the teacher used this kind of motivational pressure, his grades got a little better.

A little better, and in the end he took the college entrance exam and got into a third-tier university, or something like our "third-tier colleges" here. It was the local "University of Tokushima."

But note this: the University of Tokushima did not have a physics department!

His dream was to "become a physicist," so many of his classmates pitied him and said:

"Oh, you're just... his life is over, you know!

You want to be a physicist, and you ended up at a university like this, there's no hope!"

Then this guy said something that really showed his character:

"If I had really disbanded the volleyball team back then, I could have come first in the exam, I could definitely have gone to Tokyo, I could definitely have gone to a great university!

But I don't regret it now.

I'm at the University of Tokushima, and I hope to finish three years' worth of material in one year. Once I finish that, I can take the exam for a master's degree. With a master's, I can go to Tokyo, I can go to a better university, and I can study physics!"

This is a person who never gives up on his dream.

And sure enough, during this process, he learned very fast.

Studying at the University of Tokushima, he learned so quickly that he wanted to leave as soon as possible. Then he met a professor named "Tada Osamu," who taught semiconductors. What he taught was exactly this "dragon ball," the blue LED: how to build it and what it could do.

Wow! When Nakamura Shuji heard this, he thought:

"This is my mission! This is what I'm meant to do!"

This person instantly had fighting spirit.

With that fighting spirit, the later part of the story shows another side of this guy's personality:

When it came time to apply for a master's program, he still chose the University of Tokushima. He didn't go to Tokyo, and he didn't go to a better university to study physics.

Why?

Because in his third year of university, he started dating a local girl, and they got married.

That girl said:

"I don't want to leave Tokushima. I don't want to leave my hometown."

So Nakamura Shuji said:

"Forget Tokyo! I'm staying in Tokushima!"

Even after graduating, he couldn't leave Tokushima. He had promised his wife.

So what now? Go find a job.

Tokushima didn't have any big companies, so he joined a small company called "Nichia Chemical," a provincial business.

The small company had about 200 people, most of them local farmers from Tokushima. When farming season came, hardly anyone would show up to work at the company.

So Nakamura Shuji ended up doing research and development there.

On his first day in R&D, he went straight to his boss and said:

"I want to make a blue LED!"

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