Clicking the remote control on your television or garage door opener, you probably don’t give a second thought to how it works or who might be earning royalties from the invention. But if you trace the history of the ever-present LED (light-emiting diode) technology back to the inventor, you come across a longtime Pacific Palisades resident, Rubin Braunstein. After a completing a Ph.D. in physics from Syracuse and a year of post-doctorate work at Columbia, Braunstein went to work as a researcher at the Radio Corporation of America laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey in 1954. He recalls that he was encouraged to ‘walk around the lab and work on whatever interests you.’ What interested him were radiative transitions in semiconductors’or to put it simply, learning whether infrared emissions could be controlled and directed. ‘I got an idea to take a semiconductor, cool it down to the temperature of helium, apply voltage and see if it would conduct waves,’ Braunstein explains. But before he was able to finish his work he was almost fired. Still living in New York City with his wife, Jacqueline, he had to leave Princeton by a certain time to catch the last train. ‘I hated to leave the lab, because helium was quite expensive,’ he says, ‘so I worked until the last possible moment and then caught a cab to the train station.’ When his bosses told him this was a cost that they wouldn’t pay, Braunstein switched to semiconductors that used infared materials instead of helium, and came up with his historic breakthrough when they conducted infrared waves. In September 1955, Braunstein wrote a paper for the journal Physical Review called ‘Radiative Transitions in Semiconductors,’ which chronicled his discovery. He explained how he was able to generate a wave that ran a phonograph player across the room from a semiconductor device, the first LED. When a secretary stepped into the room, and in front of the wave, the phonograph record stopped playing; when she moved, it resumed, proving it was a wave transmission. As an RCA employee, Braunstein received a $100 bonus for his invention and he used the money to buy his wife, Jacqueline, a new watch. He was happy about the extra money, but now points out, ‘I should be a multi-billionaire today.’ Others scientists went on to refine and improve on Braunstein’s early discovery, which belonged to RCA. In 1961, a patent was issued to two scientists at Texas Instruments, but the Smithsonian Institution recognizes Braunstein as the first person ‘to report on infrared emission from GAAs [gallium arsenide] and other semiconductor alloys.’ ‘Once I did the infrared LED, I went on to other things,’ Braunstein says. ‘But when you first start developing something, even if it’s early, you recognize the significance.’ Take light bulbs, for example. A normal incandescent bulb has a lifetime of 1,000 hours, an LEF bulb can last 10,000 hours, but LED white bulbs have a 20,000-hour life. ‘The push is fluorescent,’ Braunstein says, ‘but the future is LED.’ Watching television on New Year’s Eve, as the big ball (consisting of 9,576 LED bulbs), drops at Times Square, you can credit Braunstein. Same for the bar codes on products that are scanned in supermarkets, and high-mounted brake lights on cars, trucks and buses. ‘All of the origins for these inventions come from a simple scientific thing,’ Braunstein says. ‘If you do basic physics, little by little it will change your life.’ Braunstein left RCA in 1964 to accept a professorship at UCLA to continue his experiments and teach. He retired 14 years ago, but continues to conduct research. ‘Instead of playing golf, I go to my lab,’ he says. ‘Physics is fun.’ Current research includes the study of the band structures, and the lattice dynamics of semiconductors, metals and insulators, both crystalline and amorphous. He has also spent eight years working on improving solar-cell efficiency. Wife Jacqueline, in a 2006 interview with the Palisadian-Post, summed up her husband: ‘Being married to a scientist is different because what he has on his mind, is always creating something new.’ Jacqueline explained that his mind was focused on science and he concentrated on that, not the everyday thoughts that most Americans focus on. Although Braunstein is 85, his lab received a grant from the West Los AngelesVeterans Administration to work on biomarkers that could detect early-stage pancreatic cancer. ‘You might be able to detect diseases by your breath,’ he says. ‘People should realize it is an important area of research.’ (There is no early test for this particular cancer and normally it is not found until it’s too late to treat the person.) ‘We’re making progress,’ Braunstein said. A year ago, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was on a ladder next to a traffic light at an intersection in Westwood replacing the bulbs with LED bulbs. Jacqueline happened to walk by and told officials that her husband had invented LEDs. One wonders if they realized the importance of what Jacqueline was telling them. Probably not, or they would have asked the inventor of this light to be there as well. He was just around the corner in his lab.
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