The secret behind the LCD screen

From the creator

We are surrounded by screens for much of our daily life: televisions, computers, mobile phones, tablets, the GPS in the car and so on. And around 90 per cent of these screens draw on the same technology, LCD or Liquid Crystal Display. The man behind this technology is Swiss inventor Martin Schadt. Sales of LCD television screens are thought to overtaken the older cathode ray technology in 2007 and in 2012 40 million sets were sold. Inventor Martin Schadt said: "They are flat, they are low weight and they have very low rate operating voltage, very low power consumption. You can view them from any direction today; they have a very good color quality. Looking around here in this shop, we have portable radios, so all portable application they couldn't be possible without this technology, because they would consume too much power to display the information which they have to display." We went to meet Martin Schadt in the Swiss town of Liestal, not far from Basel. The 75-year-old continues to work on his invention, improving the optical quality of the display and trying to open up new fields and newapplications for the liquid crystals. Unsurprisingly he has plenty of LCD screens at home. To see how they work, we need to get up close and personal with the screen itself. The image is composed of thousands of little dots, which continually change colour and brightness. Each one is a liuid crystal and is made up of hydrocrabon molecules which change orientation under an electri

Published 2013-05-22 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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