Pixels and light
40% off TNW Conference!
The long and thin molecules pack against one another in an ordered rectangular arrangement of rows.
By analogy, imagine a group of schoolchildren all waving skipping ropes.
Polarizing filters bring order to emanating light waves by only allowing waves with a particular orientation to pass.
As well as in LCDs, you find them in some sunglasses, for example.
If we return to our rope analogy, imagine the ropes are fed through a slatted gate.
Now imagine you have two polarizing filters.
You place one on top of the other and hold them up to the light.
As expected, they cut out some of the light getting to your eye.
Now, while keeping one in front of the other, you twist a filter by 90 degrees.
At the heart of LCDs are two polarizing filters in this orientation.
Polarizing filters when turned 90 degrees to one another are opaque.
You need some means to switch the liquid crystals light-twisting properties on and off.
That way you’ve got the option to control whether a pixel is bright or dark.
This convinced him that the UK needed to develop a color flat-screen panel.
He couldnt answer but a young George Gray, a chemistry lecturer from the University of Hull, could.
And that moment of brilliance won him the contract.
Removing the power allowed the stack to reform and the pixel to flip back to white.
The molecule is known as4-Cyano-4-pentylbiphenyl, or 5CB for short.
And by 1974 the first devices containing this compound were on sale, such as calculators and digital watches.
Color screens came a bit later.
The firstcolor flat-screenTVs hit the market in 1988 when the Sharp Corporation launched its 14-inch LCD TV.
Unfortunately Stonehouse missed seeing his vision come to fruition as he had died earlier that year.
