David Lammers

An Engineer's Brilliant! Tale
November 16, 2007

With the holidays approaching and a bit of leisure time ahead of us, please consider reading a book about Shuji Nakamura, the inventor of the blue light emitting diode, by Bob Johnstone.

It is not often that a single book combines so many interesting elements of the story that is modern-day technology. Within Brilliant! Shuji Nakamura and the Revolution in Lighting Technology are:

-- A biography of a unique Japanese man who became fascinated with the quest to build LEDs.

-- A expert look at Japan’s business and educational culture, written by one of the few Western journalists who combines Japanese language ability with an appreciation for technology.

-- Mini-biographies of entrepreneurs in the LED lighting industry – hidden gems within the 336-pages.

-- An appreciation for the interplay between machines, materials, and LEDs. The effort Nakamura puts into his quest is inspiring.

One of the fascinating chapters within Brilliant! is the description of Nakamura’s jouney, at age 34 and with basic English language skills, to study for a year at the University of Florida at Gainesville. There, Nakamura helped build an MOCVD machine required for his research efforts.

Johnstone writes that Nakamura  “had to spend ten months of his precious year in the United States with his sleeves rolled up, connecting pipes and welding quartz, just like back at Nichia. He threw himself into the task, working 16 hours a day, seven days a week. “

The work paid off, as Nakamura gained “an intimate familiarity with the inner workings of MOCVD equipment that few could match.”

Ramu Ramaswamy, one of his professors at Florida described Nakamura thusly. “He was a bulldog worker. He would work around the clock. I used to come back to the lab late at night, sometimes I’d stay until ten, then I’d go home and I’d forget something. I’d get in my car and drive back to the lab and I’d see him working at two o’clock. Next day I’d come back at five or six in the morning, and he’d be still there! I’d say to him, Don’t you go home and sleep? And he’d say Well, I was in the middle of this, so I thought I’d finish it. I think maybe he felt somewhat insecure, because he was so motivated, and so driven.”

Brilliant! (Prometheus Books) is Johnstone’s second book. His first, “We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age” is the best work to date about Japan’s early transistor pioneers. A Scot by birth, Johnstone worked as a journalist in Japan for more than a decade before moving to Australia and taking up book writing.

If you get Brilliant! finished over the holidays, put “We Were Burning” on your list for next year – you won’t regret reading either.

Posted by David Lammers on November 16, 2007 | Comments (1)