this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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me_irl
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Mind you, white LEDs might be very different to incandescent light bulbs but they aren't conceptually a million miles away from fluorescent lights; they exploit the same concept of efficiently generating a narrowband emission and using it to stimulate a phosphor which creates a broad band of lights, it's just using a blue LED rather than a tube full of mercury plasma glowing in UV.
I'd go as far as saying a white LED is more or less a solid state fluorescent light, in a similar way to how some 1950s datasheets talk about transistors as 'solid state triodes'.
I agree that LEDs are a lot more similar to fluorescent lights than incandescent bulbs, but growing up nobody ever lauded "the inventor of fluorescent lights". I don't even know who that might be.