Introducing... Stuff Matters with Ed Conway

0:00Ed Conway:Hello, Ed Conway here. I'm Sky News' economics and data editor and our latest podcast host, and I'm here to give you a wee break from Neil Patterson. So, I've briefly taken over the This Is Why podcast feed just this time to tell you about my brand new series. It's called Stuff Matters. In each episode, I take an unassuming object from our lives and look beneath the surface to understand what it can tell us about the world around us in unexpected and often quite profound ways. If you like burrowing down into rabbit holes and all sorts of random but honestly totally mind-bending topics, well, I think you'll like it, and you'll never look at the everyday objects around you quite the same again.

0:44Ed Conway:And here is a little taster of our very first episode about a scientific breakthrough that changed the world. In this case, it's all about how the lights surrounding us have completely changed in the past few years, thanks to one of the most important inventions of the past decades, light-emitting diodes. So, here's a little bit of our episode on LEDs, including an exclusive interview with the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who helped invent them.

1:15Ed Conway:The year is 1979. Shuji Nakamura has just finished his electrical engineering degree at a local university in Tokushima, a small Japanese city he grew up in. So initially after graduation, I wanted to join a big company like Toshiba, Panasonic, Sony. That's my dream. Shuji wanted to go to Tokyo or Osaka to be a young man in a big city, but his university advisor didn't think that was such a good idea. You cannot survive in a big city. Competition is so hard, so you have to stay here in Tokushima. Shuji is basically still just a kid fresh out of uni, so he listens to his advisor, who sets him up with a job closer to home at a small chemicals company called Nichiya.

2:08Ed Conway:At first, it seems like it's a total mistake. The chemicals factory, which is outside the city in a pine forest, is so pungent, Shuji can barely stand it. The place stinks. Or rotten eggs. It gets worse. The scientists working at Nichia, all of their clothes, they're grimy, they're stained, dark, yellow and red because of a particular chemical they're working with.

2:47Ed Conway:This is a million miles away from the career Shuji was dreaming of. But he doesn't have any decent alternatives, so he learns to breathe through his mouth and joins Nichir's tiny research and development team. Soon, a guy from the sales department tasks them with developing a new product, a gallium phosphite crystal used to make green and red LEDs. Shiji thinks it's doable, but he needs a special kind of furnace to make the crystal, an expensive furnace. 30 ,000 US dollars Shuji's boss thinks he must be joking asking for so much cash My boss says, oh you're crazy My company? No money, you are crazy So what's Shuji going to do?

3:31Ed Conway:Build his own furnace? So I have to make a furnace myself Oh Homemade reactor

3:43Ed Conway:Shuji walks out to the back of the building where Niciya scientists dump old spare parts of their lab equipment. He picks through the scraps and literally welds them together to make his own reactor. Obviously, it's not perfect. There are cracks in the pipes. At one point, as he experiments to make the crystal, the reactor explodes. Smoke engulfs the lab and Shuji with it. Quite big smoke. His colleagues rush over to his lab. They can't see anything, just Shuji trying to put out the explosion. They yell to check if he's OK. You are surviving, you are OK. Everyone came to me, OK, I'm OK.

4:32Ed Conway:These explosions become a sort of routine. A couple of big bangs every month. And in the end, after three years of tinkering with the reactor and firefighting, Shuji finally finishes the crystal. And, lo and behold, it makes the company no money. No profit at all. Still, Shuji has, at the very least, invented a brand new LED crystal, even if no one wants to buy it. Now, over these three years, he's spent a lot of his time doing research, reading academic papers about LEDs and crystals, and he notices something. everyone is going on about this intractable problem which no one has been able to crack almost as if it was this this mythical uncatchable creature the blue led now if we want to see why the blue led is such a big deal we're going to have to rewind to the very beginning of human civilization.

5:33Ed Conway:Bear with me. For most of our existence, humanity had only very little control over light. And it improved only very slowly. 400 ,000 years ago, Neanderthals first got some dry wooden stalks to catch, and we discovered fire. And for the first time ever, we generated our own light. A few hundred thousand years went by, and we invented lamps. At first, just hollowed out rocks or skulls with animal fat. And then candles. And then, another 4 ,000 years later, oil lamps burning tallow, animal fat and whale oil, taking us into the 1700s. But most of those early lights were really dim. That is, until electricity.

6:24Ed Conway:Edison, Tesla and light bulbs. All of a sudden, lights became bright. We put them in cars, on theatre marquees, in the back of fridges when you need a late night snack. I mean, we lit up the entire world with them. And thanks to all this light, humanity transformed. We could all do more, for longer, way after the sunset. But there's always been a catch with incandescent light bulbs, which is what we call traditional bulbs, a limit. And it is that they are very, very, very inefficient. Only 5-10 % of the power you run through them actually turns into light. The rest is just wasted on creating heat which you'll know if you've tried to change a light bulb that's been on for a while.

7:16Ed Conway:That heat wastes an extraordinary amount of money and energy. A massive chunk of the power generated in power stations basically goes into heating light bulbs, not lighting them up. But in the 1960s, scientists developed LED lights. These are tiny diodes, essentially a relative of the silicon chip, run a current through an LED and almost all of the energy is turned into light, not heat. The problem was for a long time, we could only make them red and green. But if anyone developed a blue LED, well, you'd have the full light spectrum. You can make any colour. You can make displays, or pretty importantly, white lights, using just a fraction of the energy of an incandescent bulb.

8:09Ed Conway:But inventing a blue LED was easier said than done. In fact, it was a massive, long-standing scientific challenge. whoever could figure that out would revolutionize humanity's relationship with light again and make a lot of money. In the 70s and 80s the quest for a blue LED becomes a global technological arms race but year after year none of these armies of scientists were any closer to success, giving Shuji a crazy idea. Crazier even than building his own furnace. Could he make a blue LED? He starts to pester his boss. More as a joke than anything else. But the answer is the same as always. We're broke.

9:08Ed Conway:No money, no. And also, how could a little Japanese chemicals company do this if the world's smartest scientists can't. No brain. So for years, Shudgy is told to work on something else, anything but blue LEDs. Eventually, he cracks. I became so angry. I can quit the company anytime also. So before quitting, I wanted to do what I wanted to do. He's going to quit. But before he does, he's going to ask one last time. He marches into Nichia's founder's office and makes his plea. Will you let me do blue LED research? The founder sizes him up and says, okay, no problem. Wow.

9:59Ed Conway:Shuji expected to get fired on the spot. He was not expecting a yes. Why the boss's change of heart? Shuji thinks it was mostly because of just how doggedly he'd worked for years. The founder thought he might be worth a shot. So, in the mid-80s, he gets to work on blue LEDs. There are millions of dollars riding on his research, and he starts to feel the pressure. I became so nervous. Now I have the biggest responsibility. Now, there are two chemical compounds that could make a blue LED, zinc selenide and gallium nitride. Without going into the science of it all, the key thing you need to know is that almost every other scientist is working only with the first compound, zinc selenite, because the other one, gallium nitride, was just really hard to form into the crystalline structure you need if you want it to behave like a diode.

10:53Ed Conway:Essentially, anyone working with gallium nitride is considered crazy. I never expected I could invent Bulele, but I could write a paper using gallium nitride. Now, this is important because in Japan, if you write five research papers, you can get a PhD. So even if his blue LED project fails, Shuji thinks to himself, well, I might at least get a doctorate out of this. So that's the path he takes. But it's hard, even harder than Shuji expected. For any hope of success, he needs to produce a perfect translucent gallium nitride crystal. Every day, for six months, he fires up the reactor, but the crystal that comes out is...

11:39Ed Conway:Black. Black, which is not good. Yeah, terrible. Months pass. A year goes by. Still, day after day, the crystals coming out, looking like chunks of dark goo. He rebuilds and adjusts the reactor as he's done before, and then eventually, one afternoon, to Shuji's total astonishment. Wow, first beautiful transparent colour He's finally made a translucent gallium nitride crystal But he's still nowhere near a workable LED No, no, no, no, no, no, no That doesn't matter to Shuji though What he's thinking is I can write a paper about my incredible progress Paper, yes, I'm so excited I can publish paper first time, you know I never published any paper, so yeah One paper down, four more to go After two months, he improves the properties of his crystal better than anyone else has been able to.

12:40Ed Conway:But still, not good enough. At this stage, Shuji still wasn't expecting he could actually do it. Because even after making the perfect crystal, there's still one more challenge. Adding another element, indium, which will allow the LED to emit that blue light. And guess what? Everybody failed. Nobody could make Indian garim right there. But now, tucked in a pine tree forest, unbeknownst to nearly anyone else in the scientific community, Shuji is within touching distance of one of the greatest achievements in science and technology. It's 1992, years since Shuji started working on this. After another adjustment of his reactor, Finally, he gets it.

13:33Ed Conway:A translucent gallium nitride crystal. In theory, he now has all the parts needed for a blue LED. But he doesn't let himself get too excited. This is still not a big moment. Shuji's fear is that because of how unreliable gallium nitride is, The blue LED might struggle to glow for longer than an hour or so, making it totally useless. So he does something called a lifetime test. He lines up 10 of his prototype blue LEDs in the lab. He switches them on and goes home. He wants to see if the diodes can last through the night.

14:26Ed Conway:The next morning, he gets to work bright and early as always. 7am, I came to the company and I went to my office and immediately got to the lab. Shuji opens the door and... Wow!

14:47Ed Conway:OK, that's enough. I told you it was just a sneak preview. To listen to the whole thing about how LEDs change the world, about the obscure economist who predicted a century and a half ago how inventions like this might backfire, and even about what this story might teach us about the artificial intelligence boom, well, you'll have to listen to the full thing. And maybe the bonus episode too, which you can get by subscribing and becoming a Sky News insider. Search for Stuff Matters wherever you get your podcasts.