Spent about two hours this past weekend on a ladder replacing bulbs, which is not how I planned to spend a Saturday, but the hallway fixture had been buzzing at me for a month and I finally cracked. Pulled three dead CFLs out of various fixtures around the house and replaced them with LEDs, and then two days later I read that the Nobel Prize in Physics went to three guys for inventing the blue LED. Felt weirdly validated, like the Nobel committee had been watching me on that ladder and decided to back me up.
The prize (announced October 7th) went to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura, and if you're wondering why "blue LED" is Nobel-worthy when LEDs have been around since the 60s, here's the thing I didn't fully appreciate until I looked it up: red and green LEDs were easy, comparatively. Blue was the hard one, and without blue you can't make white light out of LEDs at all. No blue, no white LED bulbs, no LED TV backlights, no Blu-ray (the "blue" is literally the blue-violet laser). Akasaki and Amano cracked it in Japan in the early 90s, Nakamura refined it into something actually manufacturable, and the whole efficient-lighting industry more or less starts there.
Nakamura's backstory is honestly the better story than the physics. He was working for a small Japanese chemical company called Nichia, got basically nothing for inventing something that made the company an enormous amount of money, quit, and sued them. Settled for something like $8 million after asking for way more, and now he's a professor at UC Santa Barbara. I don't know the guy obviously, but there's something satisfying about the inventor of the thing lighting your house also being the guy who fought his old employer in court over it. Doesnt usually go that way.
Anyway, back to my ladder. The bulbs I bought were Cree brand, the ones in the vaguely amber-tinted packaging that Home Depot has been pushing hard all year, and they ran me about $12.97 each, which still makes me wince a little every time I think about it next to a $1 incandescent. But I've had two of the same bulbs in my kitchen for over a year now running probably five hours a day and they haven't so much as flickered, and I genuinely do not think about them, which is the whole point. The CFL era was different. I always felt like I was managing my lightbulbs — waiting thirty seconds for them to warm up to full brightness, worrying faintly about the mercury every time one of them died (I broke one in 2012 and spent twenty minutes googling whether I needed to evacuate the room, which in retrospect was a little much).
I'm not going to pretend I fully understand the doping chemistry of gallium nitride semiconductors, and I'm suspicious of anyone on the internet this week who suddenly does. But the practical version is easy enough to get: something like a quarter of the world's electricity goes to lighting, and LED bulbs use roughly a fifth of the power of incandescents for the same brightness while lasting something like twenty-five times longer. That's not a marginal improvement, that's a different category of thing, and it's a little strange that it traces back to three specific people figuring out one specific stubborn problem with a specific color of light.
I've still got two lamps in the living room running on incandescents because I like the color temperature better for reading at night, and every LED bulb I've tried in there looks slightly clinical to me, a little too blue-white even on the "warm" ones. Maybe that's a me problem. Maybe I just need to spend more than $13 and get something better. Either way I'm not swapping those two out yet, prize-winning technology or not.
Also somewhat unrelated but I noticed while I was up on the ladder that the smoke detector chirping I'd been ignoring for two weeks was in fact a real thing and not, as I'd hoped, my imagination. Replaced that battery too. Productive Saturday, all things considered.