The 21st Century Nikola Tesla

The Youtube Channel Veritasium has a fascinating little documentary on the engineer Shuji Nakamura, who, during the early 90s, invented the Blue LED, a task which was once thought impossible, and he did it while working at Nichia, a small Japanese semiconductor company. On the back of his invention of Blue LEDs, the company quadrupled in size and made nearly $400 Million in Blue LED sales alone. They gave him $170 per patent.

Luckily, Nakamura’s story ends happier than Tesla, and he ends up winning the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics, and is currently running the Material Sciences lab at UCSB in California.

It’s a fascinating story. Go watch it