THE VIDEO SHELF · invention of the blue led
Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED
Veritasium tells the story of how Shuji Nakamura and others made the blue LED, long thought nearly impossible. It covers the materials challenge of gallium nitride and the persistence it took.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN recommends it as a gripping story of single-minded persistence against the herd, and as the back story behind modern LED lighting.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Veritasium
- Topic
- invention of the blue led
- Format
- documentary
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 10
- HN mentions in dataset
- 15
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2024–2026
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
I (and my 6-year-old) really enjoyed this video from Veritasium about the invention of the blue LED. [VIDEO]
waltbosz on Hacker News · 2025-06
In US Streetlights Are Turning Purple>It is absolutely stupid to talk about this as edisons revenge. If Tesla had the modern high power transistors needed to get high voltage dc out of the ac produced from a spinning turbine he would be all for high voltage dc too. This! The …
teleforce on Hacker News · 2026-03
In In Edison’s Revenge, Data Centers Are Transitioning From AC to DCThe Veritasium youtube channel has a few interesting videos related to this topic: This one is on IQ: [LINK] Pay attention to the stats on how IQ correlates to success (near the end). This one is about becoming an expert: [LINK] This one is about …
swframe2 on Hacker News · 2024-02
In Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.