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00:00LEDs don't get their color from their plastic covers.
00:03And you can see that because here is a transparent LED
00:06that also glows the same red color.
00:09The color of the light comes from the electronics themselves.
00:12The casing just helps us tell different LEDs apart.
00:15In 1962, General Electric Engineer Nick Holignac
00:19created the first visible LED.
00:21It glowed a faint red.
00:24A few years after that,
00:25engineers at Monsanto created a green LED.
00:29But for decades, all we had were those two colors.
00:33So LEDs could only be used in things like indicators,
00:36calculators, and watches.
00:38If only we could make blue,
00:40then we could mix red, green, and blue to make white
00:44and every other color,
00:45unlocking LEDs for every type of lighting in the world,
00:49from light bulbs to phones to computers to TVs to billboards.
00:54But blue was almost impossible to make.
00:59throughout the 1960s,
01:01every big electronics company in the world,
01:04from IBM to GE to Bell Labs,
01:07raced to create the blue LED.
01:10They knew it would be worth billions.
01:13Despite the efforts of thousands of researchers,
01:15nothing worked.
01:18Ten years after Holignac's original LED
01:20turned into 20, then 30,
01:22and the hope of ever using LEDs for light faded away.
01:27According to a director at Monsanto,
01:29these won't ever replace the kitchen light.
01:32They'd only be used in appliances,
01:34car dashboards, and stereo sets
01:36to see if the stereo was on.
01:39This might still be true today,
01:40if not for one engineer who defied the entire industry
01:44and made three radical breakthroughs to create the world's first blue LED.
01:52Shuji Nakamura was a researcher at a small Japanese chemical company named Nishia.
01:57They had recently expanded into the production of semiconductors to be used in the manufacture of red and green LEDs.
02:04But by the late 1980s, the semiconductor division was on its last legs.
02:08They were competing against far more established companies in a crowded market,
02:12and they were losing.
02:14Tensions started to run high.
02:17Younger employees begged Nakamura to create new products,
02:20while senior workers called his research a waste of money.
02:25And at Nishia, money was in short supply.
02:29Nakamura's lab mainly consisted of machinery he had scavenged and welded together himself.
02:34Phosphorus leaks in his lab created so many explosions
02:37that his co-workers had stopped checking in on him.
02:40By 1988, Nakamura's supervisors were so disillusioned with his research
02:45that they told him to quit.
02:47So it was out of desperation that he brought a radical proposal
02:51to the company's founder and president, Nobuo Ogawa.
02:56The elusive blue LED that the likes of Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic had all failed at.
03:02What if Nishia could be the one to create it?
03:05After suffering loss after loss on their semiconductors for more than a decade,
03:10Ogawa took a gamble.
03:12He devoted 500 million yen, or $3 million, likely around 15% of the company's annual profit,
03:19to Nakamura's Moonshot project.
03:22Everyone knew that LEDs have the potential to replace light bulbs.
03:28Because light bulbs, the universal symbol for a bright idea,
03:32are actually terrible at making light.
03:35They work by running current through a tungsten filament, which gets so hot it glows.
03:40But most of the electromagnetic radiation comes out as infrared heat.
03:45Only a negligible fraction is visible light.
03:49In contrast, LED stands for light-emitting diode.
03:53It's right there in the name.
03:55LEDs primarily create light, so they're far more efficient.
03:59And a diode is just a device with two electrodes,
04:02which only allows current to flow in one direction.
04:06So here's how an LED works.
04:09When you have an isolated atom, each electron in that atom occupies a discrete energy level.
04:15You can think of these energy levels like individual seats from a hockey stadium.
04:19And all atoms of the same element, when they are far apart from each other,
04:22have identical available energy levels.
04:25But when you bring multiple atoms together to form a solid, something interesting happens.
04:30The outermost electrons now feel the pull not only of their own nucleus,
04:35but of all the other nuclei as well.
04:37And as a result, their energy levels shift.
04:40So instead of being identical, they become a series of closely spaced but separate energy levels.
04:47An energy band.
04:49The highest energy band with electrons in it is known as the valence band.
04:53And the next higher energy band is called the conduction band.
04:56You can think of it like the balcony level.
05:00In conductors, the valence band is only partially filled.
05:03This means with a little bit of thermal energy,
05:05electrons can jump into nearby unfilled seats.
05:09And if an electric field is applied, they can jump from one unfilled seat to the next
05:13and conduct current through the material.
05:16In insulators, the valence band is full.
05:19And the difference in energy between the valence and conduction bands, the band gap, is large.
05:25So when an electric field is applied, no electrons can move.
05:29There are no available seats to move into in the valence band.
05:33And the band gap is too big for any electrons to jump into the conduction band.
05:37Which brings us to semiconductors.
05:40Semiconductors are similar to insulators, except the band gap is much smaller.
05:46This means at room temperature, a few electrons will have sufficient energy to jump into the
05:51conduction band.
05:53And now they can easily access nearby empty seats and conduct current.
05:57Not only that, the empty seats they left behind in the valence band can also move.
06:02Well, really, it's the nearby electrons jumping into those empty seats.
06:06But if you look from afar, it's as though the empty seat or hole is moving, like a positive charge,
06:12in the opposite direction to the electrons in the conduction band.
06:18By themselves, pure semiconductors are not that useful.
06:22To make them way more functional, you have to add impurity atoms into the lattice.
06:27This is known as doping.
06:29For example, in silicon, you can add a small number of phosphorus atoms.
06:33Phosphorus is similar to silicon, so it easily fits into the lattice.
06:36But it brings with it one extra valence electron.
06:40This electron exists in a donor level just beneath the conduction band.
06:44So with a bit of thermal energy, all these electrons can jump into the conduction band and conduct current.
06:50Since most of the charges that can move in this type of semiconductor are electrons, which are negative,
06:55this sort of semiconductor is called n-type, n for negative.
07:00But I should point out that the semiconductor itself is still neutral.
07:03It's just that most of the mobile charge carriers are negative.
07:06They're electrons.
07:08So there is also another type of semiconductor where most of the mobile charge carriers are positive,
07:12and it's called p-type.
07:16To make p-type silicon, you add a small number of atoms of, say, boron.
07:20Boron fits into the lattice, but brings with it one fewer valence electron than silicon.
07:24So it creates an empty acceptor level just above the valence band.
07:29And with a bit of thermal energy, electrons can jump out of the valence band, leaving behind holes.
07:34It is these positive holes which are mostly responsible for carrying current in the p-type semiconductor.
07:40Again, the material overall is uncharged.
07:43It's just that most of the mobile charge carriers are positive holes.
07:48Where things get interesting is when you put a piece of p-type and n-type together.
07:52Without even connecting this to a circuit, some electrons will diffuse from n to p and fall into the holes in the p-type.
08:01This makes the p-type a little negatively charged and the n-type a little positively charged.
08:06So there is now an electric field inside an inert piece of material.
08:12Electrons keep diffusing until the electric field becomes so large it prevents them from crossing over.
08:18And now we have established the depletion region, an area depleted of mobile charge carriers.
08:24There are no electrons in the conduction band and no holes in the valence band.
08:29If you connect a battery the wrong way to this diode, it simply expands the depletion region
08:34until its electric field perfectly opposes that of the battery, and no current flows.
08:41But if you flip the polarity of the battery, then the depletion region shrinks,
08:45the electric field decreases, and electrons can flow from n to p.
08:50When an electron falls from the conduction band into a hole in the valence band,
08:55that bandgap energy can be emitted as a photon.
08:58The energy change of the electron is emitted as light.
09:02And this is how a light emitting diode works.
09:05The size of the bandgap determines the color of the light emitted.
09:10In pure silicon, the bandgap is only 1.1 electron volts,
09:14so the photon released isn't visible, it's infrared light.
09:18These LEDs are actually used in remote controls like for your TV,
09:23and you can capture them on camera.
09:24Moving up the spectrum, you can see why the first visible light LEDs were red,
09:30and then green, and why blue was so hard.
09:33A photon of blue light requires more energy and therefore a larger bandgap.
09:39By the 1980s, after hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent hunting for the right material,
09:45every electronics company had come up empty-handed.
09:48But researchers had at least figured out the first critical requirement, high-quality crystal.
09:54No matter what material you used for the blue LED, it required a near-perfect crystal structure.
10:00Any defects in the crystal lattice disrupt the flow of electrons.
10:04So instead of emitting their energy as visible light, it is instead dissipated as heat.
10:09So the first step in Nakamura's proposal to Agawa was to disappear to Florida.
10:15He knew an old colleague there whose lab was beginning to use a new crystal-making technology called
10:19Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition, or MOCVD.
10:25An MOCVD reactor, essentially a giant oven, was and still is the best way to mass-produce clean crystal.
10:33It works by injecting vapor molecules of your crystal into a hot chamber,
10:38where they react with a base material called a substrate to form layers.
10:41It's important that the substrate lattice matches the crystal lattice being built on top of it
10:46to create a stable, smooth crystal.
10:49This is a precise art.
10:51The crystal layers often need to be as thin as just a couple of atoms.
10:56Nakamura joined the lab for a year to master MOCVD.
11:01But his time there was miserable.
11:03He wasn't allowed to use the working MOCVD, so he spent 10 of his 12 months assembling a new system
11:10almost from scratch.
11:12Even worse, his lab mates shunned him, because Nakamura didn't have a doctorate,
11:17nor any academic papers to his name, as Nishia didn't allow publishing.
11:21His lab mates, all PhD researchers, dismissed him as a lowly technician.
11:27This experience fueled him.
11:29Nakamura wrote,
11:30I feel resentful when people look down on me.
11:33I developed more fighting spirit.
11:35I would not allow myself to be beaten by such people.
11:42He returned to Japan in 1989 with two things in hand.
11:46One, an order for a brand new MOCVD reactor for Nishia.
11:50And two, a fervent desire to get his PhD.
11:54At that time in Japan, you could earn a PhD without having to go to university,
11:58simply by publishing five papers.
12:01Nakamura had always known his chances of inventing the blue LED were low,
12:06but now he had a backup plan.
12:08Even if he didn't succeed, he could at least get his PhD.
12:13But now the question was, with MOCVD under his belt, which material should he research?
12:19By this time, scientists had narrowed the options down to two main candidates,
12:25zinc selenide and gallium nitride.
12:27These were both semiconductors with band gaps theoretically in the blue light range.
12:33Zinc selenide was the far more promising option.
12:36When grown in an MOCVD reactor, it had only a 0.3% lattice mismatch with its substrate, gallium arsenide.
12:44Therefore, zinc selenide crystal had about 1,000 defects per square centimeter,
12:48within the upper limit for LED functioning.
12:51Its only issue was that while scientists had figured out multiple different ways to create
12:55N-type zinc selenide, no one knew how to create P-type.
13:00In contrast, gallium nitride had been abandoned by almost everybody for three reasons.
13:06First, it was much harder to make a high-quality crystal.
13:10The best substrate for growing gallium nitride was sapphire, but its lattice mismatch was 16%.
13:16This resulted in higher defects, over 10 billion per square centimeter.
13:22The second problem was that, like zinc selenide, scientists had only ever created
13:26N-type gallium nitride using silicon. P-type was elusive.
13:32And third, to be commercially viable, a blue LED would have to have a total light output power
13:37of at least 1,000 microwatts. That's two orders of magnitude more than any prototype had ever achieved.
13:46So, between the two candidates, almost all researchers were focused on zinc selenide.
13:51Nakamura surveyed the crowded field and decided that if he were going to publish five papers by himself,
13:57he'd better focus on gallium nitride, where the competition was much less fierce.
14:02This material's main claim to fame was one development back in 1972,
14:07when RCA engineer Herbert Maruska made a tiny gallium nitride blue LED.
14:13But it was dim and inefficient, so RCA slashed the project's budget, calling it a dead end.
14:2020 years later, scientific opinion hadn't changed.
14:23When Nakamura attended the biggest applied physics conference in Japan,
14:27the talks on zinc selenide had over 500 attendees. The talks on gallium nitride had five.
14:35Two of those five attendees were the world experts on gallium nitride,
14:39Dr. Isamu Akazaki and his former grad student, Dr. Hiroshi Amano.
14:45In contrast to Nakamura's academic background, they were researchers at Nagoya University,
14:50one of Japan's best. A few years earlier, they had made a breakthrough on the first problem
14:55of high-quality crystal. Instead of growing gallium nitride directly on sapphire,
15:01they first grew a buffer layer of aluminum nitride. This has a lattice spacing in between
15:06that of the other two materials, making it easier to grow a clean gallium nitride crystal on top.
15:12The only issue was that the aluminum caused problems for the MOCDD reactor,
15:17making the process hard to scale. But Nakamura wasn't even close at this stage.
15:23Back at Nakamura, he couldn't get gallium nitride to even grow normally in his new MOCDD reactor.
15:31After six months, desperate for results, he decided to take the machine apart and build a better version himself.
15:39His 10 months spent putting together the reactor in Florida were suddenly invaluable.
15:44He began following the same routine each day. Arrive at the lab at 7am. Spend the first half of the day
15:51welding, cutting, and rewiring the reactor. Spend the rest of the day experimenting with the modified
15:56reactor to see what it can do. At 7pm, go home, eat dinner, wash, and sleep. Nakamura repeated this
16:04routine every single day, taking no weekends and no holidays except for New Year's Day, the most
16:11important holiday in Japan. After a year and a half of continuous work, he came into the lab on a winter
16:21day in late 1990. As usual, he tinkered around in the morning, grew a gallium nitride sample in the
16:27afternoon, and tested it. But this time, the electron mobility was four times higher than any gallium nitride
16:38ever grown directly on sapphire. Nakamura called it the most exciting day of his life.
16:45His trick was to add a second nozzle to the MOCVD reactor. The gallium nitride reactant gases had been
16:53rising in the hot chamber, mixing in the air to form a powdery waste. But the second nozzle released a
16:59downward stream of inert gas, pinning the first flow to the substrate to form a uniform crystal.
17:06For years, scientists had avoided adding a second stream to MOCVD because they thought it would only
17:11introduce more turbulence. But Nakamura used a special nozzle so that even when the streams combined,
17:17they remained laminar. He called his invention the two-flow reactor. Now he was ready to take on
17:25Akazaki and Amano. But instead of copying their aluminum nitride buffer layer, his two-flow design
17:30allowed him to make gallium nitride so smooth and stable, it itself could be used as a buffer layer
17:36on the sapphire substrate. This, in turn, yielded an even cleaner crystal of gallium nitride on top,
17:43without the issues of aluminum. Nakamura now had the highest quality gallium nitride crystals ever
17:50made. But just as he was getting started, things took a wrong turn.
17:57While he had been in Florida, Nobuo Ogawa had stepped back from Nishia to become chairman.
18:02In his day, Nobuo had been a risk-taking scientist, designing the company's first products. It's why
18:08he supported Nakamura's lofty plans all this time. But in his place, his son-in-law, Eiji Ogawa, became
18:15CEO of the company. And the younger Ogawa had a much stricter outlook. One Nishia client said,
18:21he has a mind of steel, and he remembers everything.
18:27In 1990, an executive at Matsushita, an LED manufacturer and Nishia's biggest customer,
18:33visited the company to give a talk on blue LEDs. In it, he claimed zinc selenide was the way forward,
18:40declaring, gallium nitride has no future. That very same day, Nakamura received a note from Eiji,
18:47stop work on gallium nitride immediately. Eiji had never supported the research and wanted to end
18:54what he saw as a colossal waste. But Nakamura crumpled up the note and threw it away. And he did so again?
19:03And again, when a succession of similar notes and phone calls came from company management.
19:09Out of spite, he published his work on the two-flow reactor without Nishia's knowledge.
19:14It was his first paper. One down, four to go.
19:20With crystal formation settled, he turned to the second obstacle, creating P-type gallium nitride.
19:26Here, Akazaki and Amano had again beaten him to the punch.
19:30They had created a gallium nitride sample doped with magnesium. But at first, it didn't perform
19:36as a P-type as they expected. However, after exposing it to an electron beam, it did behave as
19:43a P-type. The world's first P-type gallium nitride after 20 years of trying. The catch
19:50was that no one knew why it worked. And the process of irradiating each crystal with electrons
19:56was too slow for commercial production.
19:58At first, Nakamura copied Akazaki and Amano's approach. But he suspected the beam of electrons
20:05was overkill. Maybe all the crystal needed was energy. So he tried heating magnesium-doped
20:11gallium nitride to 400 degrees Celsius in a process known as annealing. The result? A completely P-type
20:19sample. This worked even better than the shallow electron beam, which only made the surfaces of
20:24the sample's P-type. And simply heating things up was a quick, scalable process.
20:30His work also revealed why the P-type had been so difficult.
20:33To make gallium nitride with MOCVD, you supply the nitrogen from ammonia. But ammonia also contains
20:40hydrogen. Where there should have been holes in the magnesium-doped gallium nitride,
20:45these hydrogen atoms were sneaking in and bonding with the magnesium, plugging all the holes. Adding
20:52energy to the system released the hydrogen from the material, freeing up the holes again.
21:00By now, Nakamura had all the ingredients to make a prototype blue LED, and he presented it at a
21:06workshop in St. Louis in 1992, and received a standing ovation. He was beginning to make a name for
21:13himself. But even though he had created the best prototype to date, it was more of a blue-violet
21:19color, and still extremely inefficient, with a light output power of just 42 microwatts,
21:25well below the 1000 microwatts threshold for practical use.
21:30At Nishia, the new CEO's patience had run out. Eiji sent written orders to Nakamura to stop tinkering
21:37and turn whatever he had into a product. His job was on the line.
21:42But in Nakamura's own words, I kept ignoring his order. I had been successful because I didn't
21:48listen to company orders and trusted my own judgment. At this point, he only had the third
21:54hurdle left, getting his blue LED to a light output power of 1000 microwatts.
22:02A known trick to increase the efficiency of LEDs was to create a well, a thin layer of material at the
22:08p-n junction called an active layer that shrinks the band gap just a bit. This encourages more electrons
22:16to fall from the n-type conduction band into holes in the p-type valence band. The best active layer for
22:22gallium nitride was already known to be indium gallium nitride, which would not only make the band gap easier
22:28to cross, but also narrow it just the right amount to bring its blue-violet gap down to true blue.
22:35This time, Akasaki and Amano didn't scoop Nakamura. They were stuck trying to grow indium gallium nitride
22:41in the first place. Amano recalled,
22:44It was generally said that gallium nitride and indium nitride would not mix, like water and oil.
22:50But Nakamura had an advantage, his ability to customize his MOCVD reactor. This allowed him to
22:57use brute force, adjusting the reactor to pump as much indium as he could onto the gallium nitride
23:03in the hopes that at least some would stick. To his surprise, the technique worked, giving him a clean
23:10indium gallium nitride crystal. He quickly incorporated this active layer into his LED,
23:16but the well worked a little too well and overflowed with electrons, leaking them back into the gallium
23:23nitride layers. Unfazed, within a few months, Nakamura had fixed this too, by creating the opposite of a
23:29well, a hill. He returned to his reactor one more time to make aluminum gallium nitride, a compound with
23:36a larger band gap that could block electrons from escaping the well once inside.
23:48The structure of the blue LED had become far more complex than anyone could have imagined.
23:54But it was complete. By 1992, Shuji Nakamura had this.
24:00After 30 years of searching by countless scientists, Nakamura had done it. He had created a glorious bright blue LED that could even be seen in daylight.
24:12After 30 years of searching by countless scientists, Nakamura had done it. He had created a glorious bright blue LED that could even be seen in daylight.
24:27It had a light output power of 1500 microwatts and emitted a perfect blue at exactly 450 nanometers.
24:34It was over 100 times brighter than the previous pseudo-blue LEDs on the market. Nakamura wrote,
24:42I felt like I had reached the top of Mount Fuji.
24:46Nishia called a press conference in Tokyo to announce the world's first true blue LED.
24:51The electronics industry was stunned. A researcher from Toshiba remarked,
24:56everyone was caught with their pants down.
24:58The effect on Nishia's fortunes was immediate and explosive. Orders flooded in and by the end of 1994,
25:06they were manufacturing one million blue LEDs per month.
25:11Within three years, the company's revenue had nearly doubled.
25:15In 1996, they made the jump from blue to white by placing a yellow phosphor over the LED.
25:21This chemical absorbs the blue photons and re-radiates them in a broad spectrum across the visible range.
25:28Soon enough, Nishia was selling the world's first white LED, at last unlocking the final frontier so many had doubted.
25:37LED lighting.
25:40Over the next four years, their sales doubled again.
25:43By 2001, their revenue was approaching $700 million a year.
25:48Over 60% came from blue LED products.
25:52Today, Nishia is one of the largest LED manufacturers in the world, with an annual revenue in the billions.
26:01As for Nakamura, to whom Nishia owed the quadrupling of its fortunes?
26:06This was all while the blue LED was generating hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.
26:27Eiji Ogawa had always seen Nakamura's stubborn individuality as a liability, not a strength.
26:33The message was clear.
26:36In 2000, after more than 20 years at Nishia, Nakamura left the company for the US, where job offers had been pouring in.
26:44But his troubles with Nishia weren't over.
26:47He began consulting for Cree, another LED company.
26:51Nishia was furious and sued him for leaking company secrets.
26:55Nakamura responded by countersuing Nishia for never properly compensating him for his invention, seeking $20 million.
27:02In 2001, the Japanese courts ruled with Nakamura and ordered Nishia to pay him 10 times his initial request.
27:12But Nishia appealed and the case was eventually settled with a payout of $8 million.
27:19In the end, this was only enough to cover Nakamura's legal fees.
27:22This is all he got for an invention that now comprises an $80 billion industry.
27:33From house lights to street lights.
27:36While you watch this video on a phone, computer, or TV, if you're outside following traffic lights or displays, chances are you were relying on blue LEDs.
27:46We might even be getting too much of them.
27:52You may have heard warnings to avoid blue light from screens before bed because it can disrupt your circadian rhythm.
27:59That all comes from the gallium nitride blue LED.
28:03But as for lighting, there are virtually no downsides to an LED bulb.
28:10Compared to an incandescent or fluorescent bulb, they are far more efficient.
28:14They last many times longer, are safer to handle, and are completely customizable.
28:1930 years after the first white LED, high-end bulbs today allow you to choose between 50,000 different shades of white.
28:28Most importantly, their price has come down to only a couple of dollars more than other types of bulbs.
28:34And at their efficiency, with average daily use and electricity pricing, you can recoup that cost in only two months and continue to save for years after that.
28:44The result is a lighting revolution.
28:47In 2010, just 1% of residential lighting sales in the world were LED.
28:52In 2022, it was over half.
28:55Experts estimate that within the next 10 years, nearly all lighting sales will be LED.
29:03The energy savings will be enormous.
29:05Lighting accounts for 5% of all carbon emissions.
29:09A full switch to LEDs could save an estimated 1.4 billion tons of CO2, equivalent to taking almost half the cars in the world off the road.
29:18Today, Nakamura's research is on the next generation of LEDs.
29:25Micro LEDs and UV LEDs.
29:28So what are they making in there?
29:30LED, laser, power device.
29:33This is one of the best facilities in the US.
29:36And this is because of you.
29:38No, no, no.
29:40Well, what's a standard LED size?
29:43300 times 200 microns.
29:46The smallest is 5 microns.
29:48That is insanely tiny.
29:51So basically, you can use that light in your eye display, such as AR and VR.
29:55You could have like a retina display that's like right up here.
29:58Yep.
29:58Human hair would be about that thick.
30:00Yep.
30:01And that's a really, really tiny LED.
30:04UV LEDs could be used to sterilize surfaces like in hospitals or kitchens.
30:08Just flick on the UV lights and pathogens would be dead in seconds.
30:12Do you think this is what's coming?
30:34It's okay, it works.
30:36But probably the cost, the cost is too high.
30:38Since it's less than 10%, the cost is very high.
30:41But if the efficiency becomes more than 50%, the cost is almost comparable to the market.
30:47And you think it will happen, right?
30:48Like the efficiency will go up.
30:50Yeah, yeah, I think so.
30:51It's just a matter of time.
30:52Yeah, I think so.
30:54And he's even tackling one of the biggest challenges of our time.
30:57I'm interested in physics.
30:59Me too.
31:00I'm still interested in nuclear fusion.
31:02So recently I started the company of nuclear fusion.
31:05Really?
31:05Oh yeah, last year.
31:07No way.
31:08No way.
31:11In 2014, Nakamura, Akazaki, and Amano were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for creating the blue LED.
31:19Shortly afterwards, Nakamura publicly thanked Nishia for supporting his work.
31:23And he offered to visit and make amends.
31:26But they turned down his offer.
31:28And today their relationship is still cold.
31:31But perhaps even more important than the Nobel Prize, by the time Nakamura released his blue LED in 1994,
31:38he had published over 15 papers.
31:40And he finally received his doctorate in engineering.
31:44Today he has published over 900 papers.
31:48Throughout his entire journey, one thing has never changed.
31:53What is your favorite color?
31:55Oh, blue.
31:58Was it always blue, or only after you made the LED?
32:01I was born in the fishery village.
32:04In front of the house, it was awesome, blue always.
32:07While I was learning about Nakamura's story, I realized that what set him apart from the
32:17thousands of researchers trying to unlock the blue LED, it wasn't necessarily his knowledge,
32:22but his determination, critical thinking, and problem solving skills.
32:26Where others saw dead ends, he saw potential solutions.
32:30So if you're looking for a free and easy way to start building these skills for yourself right now,
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