From Incandescent to LEDs: A Drunken Prophecy

Today, I have an interesting story about a prophecy of drunken students fulfilled. I am not making this up, so bear with me.

It was a couple of decades ago when I was still a student, allegedly a good one. It was an evening drinking session with classmates, and with a bottle conveniently named 8 P.M., I distinctly remember Eminem’s Lose Yourself playing in the background. I am adding this info for dramatic effect; I don’t know if it’s working.

The college recently replaced the lights in Our hostel rooms with fluorescent tubes from its incumbent tungsten incandescent ones. That was the era when we used CRT monitors. The 1.44 MB floppies had just about disappeared, and the flash disks weren’t there yet. The only way you could possibly transfer MP3, was to physically remove the hard disk from one motherboard and connect it to another.

Let me set a little more premise on our engineering background here. Traditional engineering is understood (not just perceived) to be everything that has to be invented has already been invented. As engineers, all we need to do in our careers is change the lubricant of the machines or the coolants. The science behind the diodes, the mechanism of induction generators, and transformers were all well settled. Therefore our job will be to play along with the economy of scale or go back to farming.

Now, back to the hostel room. We were pretty drunk, and the fluorescent tube was doing its notorious flickering. One frustrated classmate had a eureka moment and told his prophecy.

In 20 years, all these incandescent and fluorescent bulbs will disappear and be replaced by LEDs.

Or was it a curse?

Back then, the LEDs came in two colours and had no real-life application other than indicating if power was on. Hence, they were named indicators as well. Forget then being a source of illumination; they could not even “indicate” appropriately on a good sunny afternoon. They had one job.

We all had a good laugh that day. I served him one more peg and asked him to share one more of such jokes.

Fast forward fifteen years.

I haven’t seen a single source of light other than LED at my office or home. Most automobiles have LEDs now. Only some steel lights have sodium or mercury vapour lights, but we all know it’s a matter of time.

The story’s moral is: When your drunk colleague speaks to you about something outrageous, don’t be arrogant and dismiss him; just listen. It may be a ratatouille moment.