Thread by @visakanv

me: people with ADHD aren’t *literally* distracted by random squirrels, that’s just a simplistic stereotype. A caricature, really-

also me:

"oooh, a light thingy" – 30 year old adult male

this guy Oleg Vladimirovich Losev invented LEDs decades before everybody else (in the 1920s) but nobody cared. he was a lonely nerd with no co-authors. wrote to einstein but didn't get a reply

web.archive.org/web/2011051113…

LED is a $54B/yr industry, forecasted to reach $90B+ in the next few years

ha this is interesting – the article/pdf was published in April 2007, and at the time they wrote "predicted to exceed $15B per year" – they were right! in fact it was an underestimation!

oh man, Losev died of hunger – starved to death during the blocade of Leningrad, aged 39

F

what could he have done with a little support and a little more time

"unknown and uncelebrated, this should've been the beginning of the photonic telecommunications revolution"

this familiar fren is called a Seven Segment Display

3rd pic from a patent in 1908 (Frank Wood)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-seg…

7-segment lets you do all the numbers, but you can't do all the letters

then there's 14-segment displays, and there are also less common(?) ones like 9-segments

got me curious now about all the things I may have owned with LED displays, like whatever digital watch I used as a teenager

thinking also more broadly about the ways in which the constraints of new mediums influenced typography and fonts. brian eno guitar quote etc