The Russian who invented semiconductors 25 years before the USA
Key takeaways
- Semi Doped Jun 06, 20262116Share There is a particular kind of tragedy reserved for people who are right too early.
- Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1946116He would never hold a position higher than technician, until a doctorate arrived in 1938 — four years before his death, too late to change anything.
- While fiddling with carborundum crystal detectors used in early radio receivers, Losev noticed that passing a direct current through the junction produced a faint, cold light.
Semi Doped Jun 06, 20262116Share There is a particular kind of tragedy reserved for people who are right too early. Oleg Losev was 18 years old, working as a technician at a Soviet radio lab in Nizhny Novgorod, when he built something in early 1922 that the rest of the world would take another 25 years to catch up to.
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1946116He would never hold a position higher than technician, until a doctorate arrived in 1938 — four years before his death, too late to change anything. By every bureaucratic measure, he was nobody. And yet.
While fiddling with carborundum crystal detectors used in early radio receivers, Losev noticed that passing a direct current through the junction produced a faint, cold light. Henry Round had seen something similar in 1907 and moved on. Losev stayed. He isolated the phenomenon, ruled out heat and chemical reaction, and correctly identified it as a quantum mechanical effect: the inverse of the photoelectric effect. He called it a “light relay,” patented it, and predicted it would replace incandescent bulbs in high-speed optical communications. We call it an LED. It took until April 2007, in Nature Photonics, for the academic world to formally credit him. In a 1951 Physical Review paper that cited his work, his name was misspelled as “Lossew.”