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第一篇
Inventor of LED
When Nick Holonyak set out to create a
new kind of visible lighting using semiconductor
alloys, his colleagues
thought he was
unrealistic. Today, his discovery of light-
emitting diodes, or
LEDs, are used in
everything from
DVDs to alarm clocks to
airports. Dozens of his students have continued
his work, developing lighting used in
traffic lights and other everyday
technology.
On April 23,
2004, Holonyak received the $$500,000 Lemelson-MIT
Prize at a ceremony in Washington. This
marks the 10th year that the Lemelson-
MIT Program at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) has
given the award to
prominent inventors.
“Any
time you get an award, big or little
,
it’s always a surprise.” Holonyak said.
Holonyak, 75, was a student
of John Bardeen, an inventor of the transistor, in
the early 1950s. After graduate
school
, Holonyak worked at
Bell Labs. He later went to General
Electric
, where he invented a switch
now
widely used in house dimmer
switches
.
Later,
Holonyak started looking into how semiconductors
could be used to generate light. But while his
colleagues
were looking at how to
generate invisible light, he wanted to generate
visible light. The LEDs he invented in 1962
now last about 10 times longer than
incandescent bulbs, and are more environmentally
friendly and cost effective.
Holonyak, now a professor of electrical
and computer engineering and physics at the
University of Illinois, said he
suspected that LEDs would become as
commonplace as they are today, but didn’t
re
alize how many uses they
would have.
“You
don’t know in the beginning. You think you’re
doing something important, you think it’s worth
doing, but
you really can’t tell what
the big payoff is going to be, and when, and how.
You just don’t know.” he said.
The Lemelson-MIT Program also
recognized Edith Flanigen, 75, with the $$100,000
Lemelson-MIT Lifetime
Achievement Award
for her work on a new generation of “molecular
sieves,” that can separate molecules by size.
词汇：
semiconductor
/
5semikEn5dQktE
/
n.
半导体
incandescent /
7inkAn5desnt
/ adj.
白炽的
alloy /
5AlCi
/
n.
合金
bulb /
bQlb
/
n.
灯泡
emit /
i5mit
/
v.
发射，发出
commonplace /
5kCmEnpleis
/ adj.
普通的
diode /
5daiEud
/
n.
二极管
molecular
/
molecular
/
adj.
分子的
dim
/
dim
/
adj.
灯光昏暗的
sieve /
siv
/
n.
筛注释：
1.
or
：即
2. big or
little
：不论是大是小
3.
after graduate
school
：从研究生院毕业之后
4. General
Electric
：通用电气公司
5. house dimmer
switches
：家用减光开关练习：
< br>5
3
4
2
1