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The blue LED was supposed to be impossible—until a young engineer proposed a moonshot idea.

  • Rob T Firefly@lemmy.worldEnglish
    94·
    9 months ago

    My favorite thing about widely-available blue LEDs was the effect on TV scifi.

    Watch the Star Trek shows made in the 1980s and 1990s and the tricorders, alien gadgets, and other props were always twinkling with red, yellow, and green LEDs to look futuristic. A generation later and every single hand prop on 2000s Doctor Who, Torchwood, etc. glowed and twinkled blue because the LEDs had just become cheap enough for prop makers, but weren’t yet widespread in day-to-day life so the viewers were seeing something strange and unusual.

    Now every color of LED imaginable is just common and whatever, but for a good stretch of time glowy blue became the standard “scifi” color just because that particular tech happened to turn up at that particular time.

      • filcuk@lemmy.zipEnglish
        14·
        9 months ago

        They’re still rgb plus maybe yw using colour mixing, so depending on the quality, tuning, physics and our perceptionof light, not all colours are as nice or bright.

        • aStonedSanta@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          Yeah. I just think being RgB it would be good at purple 😂 One of those situations where the name was probably not created based on logic lol

          • Alto@kbin.social
            2·
            9 months ago

            It’s called RGB because there’s a red, green, and blue diode. Not sure how that’s not a logical name.

            • aStonedSanta@lemm.eeEnglish
              1·
              9 months ago

              Oh I was making a joke cause it sucks at purple. Which is red and blue combined generally. But that’s not really how the RGB color cycle works as far as I understand in some extremely cursory Wikipedia reading lol

              • Alto@kbin.social
                2·
                9 months ago

                IIRC, it has something to do with the fact that purple sort of doesn’t actually exist. As I understand, purple is basically your brain going “idk wtf it is but it’s not green”

                  • Alto@kbin.social
                    2·
                    9 months ago

                    Right there with you.

                    More specifically, it’s because purple fires your red and blue cones, but not the green one. Normally, as green is between red and blue, anything that would trigger those two also would trigger green. So when it doesn’t, that’s when your brain goes “well I guess it’s not green???”

    • T156@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      I’m not sure that LEDs were the thing that kicked off the trend. They made it easier to implement, but even in the 80s and 90s, you had things like Tron that might have kicked off the futuristic look with neon lines/tubes.