Nobel Prize for blue LEDs questioned – New Technology

       

After almost every Nobel Prize discussion pops up: scientists won right? So even this year. Three Japanese were notoriously share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of blue LEDs: Isamu Akasaki Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura.

But An article in the American news website Semiconductor Engineering describes how two Americans developed a blue LED two decades before the Japanese.

The duo Wally Rhines and Herbert Maruska was in the early 1970s, researchers at Stanford. Together, they have sat down with a periodic table to test new material combinations. After some experimentation tested the magnesium-doped gallium nitride.

– We turned up the voltage and it was blue, said Wally Rhines to Semiconductor

Engineering.

The two researchers have also previously reported on his discovery. Here is an interview with Wally Rhines of the Computer History Museum in 2012.

This describes Herbert Maruska discovery – and how a project on the blue LED was closed down.