What Light? A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, December 1954

 

Brazilla Carroll Reece was  born in 1889 in Butler, a town in the far  northeast of Tennessee that was inundated by the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watauga Dam, begun in 1942, and completed in 1948. He attended a small Baptist college in town, and somehow made the transition to city life well enough to complete a master's in economics, and work at NYU until he completed a law degree. Or perhaps he didn't, because the next line in his Wikipedia biography says that he "also studied at the University of London.

He ran in the Republican primary in his home district in 1920, campaigning on his war record, term limits, and against "exempt profit taxes on corporations." Having won the nomination, he cruised to victory in the general, but lost in 1930 over what the biography characterises as TVA politics, even though the TVA was still two years away. (Hoover vetoed a precursor plan.) He recovered his safely Republican seat in the wipeout of 1932 notwithstanding accusations of voter fraud, retained it until 1948 when he resigned to run for a Senate seat, and recovered it in 1950, holding it until his death, still fighting for the TVA and against the New Deal.

A photogenic man and a longterm politician, it isn't surprising that there are a great many Google Images hits for "B. Carroll Reece," the one chosen here making his high colour (creepy affect, great performance) and homeboy shavecut particularly obvious. (One-sixteenth Cherokee, I'm sure, although to be fair he was consistently pro-civil rights.) So here I am, amplifying colour again. But that's only a part  why  he's in the introduction to this here "Technological Appendix." The rest is his ridiculous performance leading on from being slapped down in the 1952--54 United States House Select Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations. The chairman launched an attempt to discover how tax-exempt foundations were promoting "anti-American values" but gave up under pushback. leaving Reese to continue a lone campaign to prove that the Kinsey reports were promoting socialism and communism via sexual deviance in the form of an attempt to "reduce our meager knowledge of social phenomena to the level of an applied science." The mix of legitimate concerns --for example, the way that the foundations were promoting oligarchy-- with right wing craziness is fascinating, but, hey, what about R&D? 

GE is the poster child of the death of corporate R&D in America due to Jack Welch and all that crap, but the reality is that as long as there were generous tax deductions for R&D, it did meet Welch's criteria of making money for the shareholders. And at "a New York press show," so hardly in some obscure corner, ibut in Christmas week of 1954, "D. A. Cusano, a thirty-year-old physicist, unveiled a light-boosting cell . . .with a display of a picture of three GE executives that lit up the moment he "twist[ed] a knob that supplied everyday DC electricity in a film of special substance spread 1/2500th of an inch thick within a glass-metal screen." 

Newsweek goes on to say that "[T]he demonstration marked a significant step into the world of futuristic electronics. It foreshadowed an era when vacuum tubes will shrink in importance, while specially prepared solid  materials will do the work of shuttling electrons about. The new device could be the grandparent of layers of solid phosphor materials for TV screens that would hang flat against the wall," and goes on to list several other possible futuristic gadgets, of which the most striking is "simple devices that would help people to see in the dark." The article goes on to explain that the technology isn't quite there yet. Cusano is interested  in the light amplification angle, and this device works by re-emission rather than electrical stimulation.  The visible spectrum emissions are "brighter" than the input light, but the latter is ultraviolet, which is expensive to produce, and the output has a limited colour palette (black and white with an unpleasant yellow tinge.) Meanwhile, RCA claims to be neck and neck with GE, demonstration pending, and at least as far as the received history goes, it is RCA's work that matters. 

So what exactly is going on here? The only hit I get for "D A Cusano GE" is a ScienceDirect  header for a 1961 article investigating some properties of a Ge-GaAs film; whether the full list of references includes some to Cusano's work I can't tell you without paying an exorbitant amount of money, so let's just say that Cusano's film might have been that. A less arduous and expensive line of research turns out to be just following the Wikipedia links, ultimately to the career of Rubin Braunstein, who was working at RCA and publishing from 1955 on GaAs, GaSb, and InP LEDS. The biography seems salty that Braunstein wasn't included in the 2014 Nobel, and one wonders if Cusano died young, which would exclude him from Nobel consideration if for no other reason.

Baird looks like a nice guy

If we go over to the received history of the LED,  and go over to what Wikipedia has to say,   which is that Henry Joseph Round was able to produce light from a silicon carbide crystal at Marconi Labs in 1907 and wrote a short note on it. The work was revived by Russian inventor Oleg Losev, who died in the Siege of Leningrad, but not before corresponding with Hugo Gernsback about what the latter called "Crystodynes." Georges Destriau observed electroluminescence in zinc sulphite powder in 1936, two Hungarians patented a lighting device using the electroluminescence of silicon carbide and boron carbide. After a brief tribute to Braunstein but not Cusano, the article moves on to the 1961 Baird and Pittman article written while the two were working at the TI labs. This one was the basis for their 1962 patent. 

Yay, the LED has been invented! Finally! TI proceeded to manufacture a line of infrared light-emitting diodes to be used in "various devices." Oh, who's kidding, it was TV remotes. And maybe guns of some kind. As for GE's work on visible light emission, it turns out to be due to Nick Holonyak (1928--2022) and Robert N. Hall, who probably doesn't need an introduction here, although, if he does, it is as the/an inventor of the laser.  Amusingly, a key source for the Wiki article on Holonyak is a Reader's Digest article about early diodes. It pays to publish in a monthly if you want to get into the history books because the collected volumes are so much more wieldy!  (Looking at you, Fortune.) The Wiki article on the History of the LED goes on to tell us that "M. George Craford, a former graduate student of Holonyak. 

Well, first, this is pretty disrespectful of Cusano, but, second, Holonyak's biography notes that he was John Bardeen's (the only American double physics Nobel and co-"inventor" of the transistor) first graduate student. I guess Reece was right. Tax-deduction funded research does promote oligarchy. I bet there was deviant sex involved, too. Looking at Bardeen's official photo right onw, and I just wouldn't be surprised. Oh, Baird, you may look like a jolly old man, but we're on to you!