Night, street, LED, pharmacy

This is the third post in the series "Until I cut it, I will not calm down." (The first is about the laser , the second is about the stun gun .)


In 1899, the first hand-held flashlight was created (in a cardboard case), a DIY cubate kilowatt (equivalent) flashlight, a mega-flashlight with LEDs for 3,000 rubles (sic!) (Provided for cutting by the store green-laser.ru ) .

Wired magazine in 2012 in an article dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the creation of the LED, very mixed up the facts and incorrectly indicated "paternity". So who is the dad of LEDs?

And while I was collecting the facts, I remembered my childhood and the way we made our first engineering attempts. Usually they happened after the crowd watched a movie with Bruce Lee (Michael Dudikov or Cynthia Rothrock) in the video room for the Soviet ruble (which for some reason was always in the basement). Having bought the Planet battery for 30 kopecks and unscrewing the light bulb from the parent flashlight, we started assembling. Buying a flashlight wasn’t cool; it was cool to collect your Jedi sword . And coolness was measured by the color of electrical tape.

History of LEDs, assembly instructions for a kilowatt lamp and traditional cut

First hand

In 1899 , David Meisell received a patent for the first hand-held electric lamp of a cylindrical shape. True, in order for the flashlight to work, the switch had to be held with the thumb all the time. In 1911, lights appeared with a slide switch. After a while, the button that fixes the slider appeared.

It's all about the battery.
In 1887 , Karl Gessner created the first portable electric battery, where chemicals were inside a zinc container. All of these inventions became stages on the way to creating a flashlight.

My first

Here's what we were content with in our childhood:



It is strange that there are no pictures of the lantern assembly on the network.

First LED

Arc-AAA LED flashlight 2001

In 1999 , Lumileds Corporation introduced Luxeon LED, a powerful white light emitter.

A Brief History of Picture LEDs

In 1907 , Henry Round first discovered and described the electroluminescence he discovered while studying the passage of current in a metal-silicon carbide pair (carborundum, SiC), and noted a yellow, green, and orange glow at the cathode.

1927 These experiments were later repeated, regardless of the Round, in 1923 by O.V. Losev , who, while experimenting in the Nizhny Novgorod radio laboratory with a rectifying contact from a pair of carborundum - steel wire, found a weak glow at the contact point of two dissimilar materials - the electroluminescence of a semiconductor junction ( at that time the concept of a “semiconductor junction” did not exist yet)

In 1961Robert Bayard and Gary Pittman of Texas Instruments discovered and patented gallium arsenide infrared LED technology (an important semiconductor, the third most widely used in industry after silicon and germanium. It is also used in the production of solar cells .)




GaAs infrared (IR) patent light-emitting diode (US Patent US3293513 ), the first practical use of a light emitting diode (LED).

In 1962 , the first LED in the visible portion of the spectra (red) was developed. Nick Holonyak worked for General Electric.

In addition to the invention of the LED, Nick Holonyak received 41 patents for other inventions. These include a red semiconductor laser, commonly called a laser diode (it is used in CD and DVD players and cell phones) and a pnpn key with a closed emitter (used in dimmers and power tools). He was directly involved in the creation of the first General Electric dimmer.

LEDs remained extremely expensive until 1968 (about $ 200 apiece) in

1971 , Jacques Pankov from the RCA laboratory created the first blue LED.

1972 His former student, Holonyak, George Kraford, invented the world's first yellow LED and improved the brightness of red and red-orange LEDs by 10 times.

In 1976In the year, T. Piersol created the world's first high-performance high-brightness LED for telecommunication applications, specially adapted for data transmission via fiber-optic communication lines.

In 1993, Isama Akasaki, who worked with Hiroshi Amano at Nagoya University, and Suji Nakamura, then a researcher at the Japanese corporation Nichia Chemical Industries, were able to invent a cheap blue LED. For the discovery of a cheap blue LED, the three were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014 ,



2006 . The first light-emitting diodes with a light output of 100 lm / W are produced. This performance indicator is superior only to a discharge lamp.

LED for 3000 rubles (today)

Dealing with powerful lasers and stun guns, I could not pass by and side of this instance .



In fact, this is also the first flashlight in my hands with mechanized focusing (adjustable by pressing a button).





2000 Lm, Lighting distance 500m (according to the manufacturers).

Convenient charging, allows you to recharge without pulling out the battery.

Cut













And meanwhile, DIY-craftsmen made such a cool thing.

Do-it-yourself equivalent kilowatt lamp for £ 25

Oh, how I regret that at the labor lessons we unbent old nails, and did not make such things.
The video in 20 minutes tells how to assemble a monster in a box (with a soft carrying handle).




The comrade who made this flashlight is the old schoolgirl. Who noticed the frame where he compares his flashlight with an alien ship from the movie "Navigator Flight"?


PS