It is a bit weird to me that when I was a kid (in the '70s) great emphasis was placed on the inventors of the lightbulb and phonograph (Edison), the telephone (Graham Bell), and the television (Farnsworth).* And now those technologies have all been largely replaced by alternatives that work on very different physical principles. I’m not sure they even teach that inventor stuff in schools any more.
* Yes I know that nothing is ever really invented by one person.
Not exactly, but you get my point. Its not so different, just different standards using the same principles.
Analog to digital has been the biggest change I’ve noticed honestly - but still the same coax that brought me cartoons in the 90’s (analog) carries my internet today (digital).
Mind you, white LEDs might be very different to incandescent light bulbs but they aren’t conceptually a million miles away from fluorescent lights; they exploit the same concept of efficiently generating a narrowband emission and using it to stimulate a phosphor which creates a broad band of lights, it’s just using a blue LED rather than a tube full of mercury plasma glowing in UV.
I’d go as far as saying a white LED is more or less a solid state fluorescent light, in a similar way to how some 1950s datasheets talk about transistors as ‘solid state triodes’.
I agree that LEDs are a lot more similar to fluorescent lights than incandescent bulbs, but growing up nobody ever lauded “the inventor of fluorescent lights”. I don’t even know who that might be.
It is a bit weird to me that when I was a kid (in the '70s) great emphasis was placed on the inventors of the lightbulb and phonograph (Edison), the telephone (Graham Bell), and the television (Farnsworth).* And now those technologies have all been largely replaced by alternatives that work on very different physical principles. I’m not sure they even teach that inventor stuff in schools any more.
* Yes I know that nothing is ever really invented by one person.
I like to think of it this way:
Not exactly, but you get my point. Its not so different, just different standards using the same principles.
Analog to digital has been the biggest change I’ve noticed honestly - but still the same coax that brought me cartoons in the 90’s (analog) carries my internet today (digital).
Mind you, white LEDs might be very different to incandescent light bulbs but they aren’t conceptually a million miles away from fluorescent lights; they exploit the same concept of efficiently generating a narrowband emission and using it to stimulate a phosphor which creates a broad band of lights, it’s just using a blue LED rather than a tube full of mercury plasma glowing in UV.
I’d go as far as saying a white LED is more or less a solid state fluorescent light, in a similar way to how some 1950s datasheets talk about transistors as ‘solid state triodes’.
I agree that LEDs are a lot more similar to fluorescent lights than incandescent bulbs, but growing up nobody ever lauded “the inventor of fluorescent lights”. I don’t even know who that might be.