Oleg Losev (Oleg Vladimirovich Losev, Олег Владимирович Лосев, in his lifetime also spelled Lossev and Lossew; 10 May 1903 – 22 January 1942) was a Soviet radio engineer and physicist, one of the pioneers of semiconductor electronics. Working in the 1920s at the Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory, he made the first detailed study of the light given off by a semiconductor contact when a current passes through it — the effect on which the light-emitting diode (LED) works — and built the "crystadyne", a radio receiver in which a crystal of zincite amplified and generated oscillations without vacuum tubes. In 1924 the American magazine Radio News called it an "epoch-making invention", and in 2007 the journal Nature Photonics wrote that "a forgotten Russian genius — Oleg Losev — discovered the LED".[1][4][2]

Losev was born in Tver, but his main discoveries were made in Nizhny Novgorod — one of Russia's largest cities, standing where the Oka flows into the Volga, which from 1932 to 1990 was called Gorky. He joined the city's Radio Laboratory at the age of seventeen and worked there until it was reorganised at the end of 1928; his first papers on the crystadyne and on the glowing crystal appeared in the laboratory's own journal. In the words of Nature Photonics, "the happiest and most productive years of his research work were spent at the Nizhniy Novgorod Radio Laboratory". The laboratory's building on the Upper Volga Embankment is now a museum of Lobachevsky University, where his work is on display.[1][7][17]

The glowing crystal: the first study of the LED

Crystal detectors — a fine metal wire touching a mineral crystal — were the heart of early radio receivers. Working with a detector made of carborundum (silicon carbide) and a steel wire, Losev noticed a glow at the point of contact. The Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory museum dates the observation to 1923; Losev himself wrote in October 1924 that "two years ago a rather strong luminescence was observed with the naked eye at the contact of a carborundum and a steel wire detector".[8][5] His first paper on the subject, "Luminous carborundum detector and detection with crystals", was published in 1927 in the laboratory's journal Telegrafiya i Telefoniya bez Provodov (Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony); papers in the British Philosophical Magazine (1928) and the German Physikalische Zeitschrift (1929, 1931, 1933) followed.[1]

In sixteen papers published between 1924 and 1930 Losev described the effect in detail. He showed that it was "cold" light, not heat — a drop of benzine placed on the glowing spot did not evaporate faster than elsewhere — measured the current at which the glow began, recorded its spectrum and its dependence on current, observed two different kinds of glow whose colour changed with the voltage, studied it down to the temperature of liquid air, and modulated it at frequencies up to 78.5 kHz.[1][14] He explained the emission with Einstein's quantum theory, calling it an "inverse photo-electric effect" and relating the frequency of the light to the voltage at the contact by the formula ν = eV/h, which is still in use; according to Abram Ioffe, he wrote to Einstein for help in developing the theory but received no reply.[1]

Losev also saw a practical use for the effect. On 28 February 1927 he applied for a patent on a "Light Relay" (Световое реле), granted on 31 December 1929 as Soviet patent No. 12191: the glowing contact of a carborundum detector, fed with a modulated current, was to serve as a light source "for the purpose of fast telegraphic and telephone communication, transmission of images and other applications". Nature Photonics called it a missed beginning of "the photonic telecommunications revolution".[6][1]

A glow from a carborundum crystal had first been noted in 1907 by Henry Round of the Marconi company in a short note to Electrical World, which Losev apparently did not know. Following the historian Egon Loebner, Nature Photonics concluded that "it is not appropriate to credit Round with the invention of the LED", while recognising Round as the discoverer of electroluminescence.[1] For some time the effect was known in the West as "Losev light" (Lossew Licht); the French physicist Destriau, after whom one form of electroluminescence is named, attributed its discovery to Losev, and K. Lehovec and his colleagues, who showed in 1951 that the glow comes from the recombination of electrons and holes in p–n junctions, cited Losev's papers first of all.[2][3]

The crystadyne: a crystal that amplifies

On 13 January 1921, at his home laboratory in Tver during a leave, Losev found that a detector made of zincite (zinc oxide) could do more than rectify radio signals: it could also generate and amplify oscillations. At the end of 1921 he received a patent, No. 996, for "a method of generating undamped oscillations". He traced the effect to a falling section of the detector's current–voltage curve — what is now called negative resistance — reported it at the laboratory's 36th scientific "talk" on 9 March 1922 and published it in the laboratory's journal the same year. He tested more than 50 natural minerals and more than ten synthetic crystals; the best results came from zincite touched by a carbon point, and a zincite crystal could generate and amplify oscillations up to 10 MHz.[7][10][8][16][2]

In 1923 he built a "detector receiver-heterodyne" in which a single crystal contact amplified, generated and detected signals. The laboratory's workshops made four such receivers for the People's Commissariat of Posts and Telegraphs, and the Commissar rewarded Losev by a special order.[11] On 15 October 1923 the laboratory was visited by Count Arco and Dr Meissner, whom Radio News called "two of the greatest German authorities" in radio; according to the laboratory's records, Losev's oscillating detector struck Arco with its combination of novelty and simplicity.[11][4] In 1924 the laboratory published Losev's booklet Kristadin in its popular series for radio amateurs, priced at 45 kopecks, and that summer he taught radio classes for local amateurs.[12]

The device became famous abroad in 1924. French radio journals wrote about it first, and according to the laboratory's history it was the Paris magazine Radio Revue that gave the crystal heterodyne the name "kristadin", while Radio News in New York said that it had coined and trade-marked the term "Crystodyne" itself.[11][4] In its September 1924 issue Radio News devoted an editorial by Hugo Gernsback to "the epoch-making invention of Mr. O. V. Lossev of the Government Radio Electrical Laboratory of Russia", announcing that "the crystal now actually replaces the vacuum tube", and showed an experimental oscillator panel built in the Radio News Laboratories.[4] In October 1924 the British Wireless World and Radio Review printed Losev's own article "Oscillating Crystals", with an editorial note that he had "in a comparatively short space of time achieved world-wide fame in connection with his discoveries", and with the first oscillograph records of oscillations produced by crystals.[5] In 1925 Losev's semiconductor receivers were shown at the All-Union Radio Exhibition in Moscow and at the Scandinavian-Baltic radio exhibition in Stockholm.[13] Nature Photonics describes the crystadyne as "the first solid-state semiconductor amplifier and generator".[1]

Life in Nizhny Novgorod

Losev was born in Tver into the family of an office worker at the city's railway-carriage works, a retired staff captain of the Imperial Army and a nobleman. At the Tver technical secondary school (realschule) his physics teacher was Vadim Lyovshin, later a well-known specialist in luminescence. In 1917 a public lecture on wireless telegraphy by the head of the Tver radio station led him to radio, and at the station he met Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich and Professor Vladimir Lebedinsky.[7][2] In August 1918 this Tver group moved to Nizhny Novgorod, where it occupied a house on the Upper Embankment (Верхняя набережная) and became the Radio Laboratory; on 2 December 1918, the day the museum now celebrates as the laboratory's birthday, the Soviet government approved its statute.[9] In 1920, having gone to Moscow to study at the Institute of Communications, Losev met Lebedinsky and Bonch-Bruevich again at the first congress of the Association of Russian Physicists in Moscow and was invited to Nizhny Novgorod.[7]

He worked at the laboratory from October 1920 to August 1921 and again from December 1922 to December 1928, rising from laboratory assistant to engineer-head, and began his own research almost at once in Lebedinsky's laboratory; his first paper, on frequency multipliers, sent to the journal Radiotekhnik in January 1921, was signed with the single letter "O".[7] In the same year he published the first Russian-language paper on magnetic amplifiers.[24] He also lived there. The polar radio operator Ernst Krenkel, who visited the laboratory as a young man, recalled in his memoirs being told by its staff that Losev, who had started as an attendant before becoming a laboratory assistant, usually slept on a folding bed on the staircase landing, covered with a worn-out coat, while the cleaning woman washed his linen and cooked him a pot of porridge that lasted three days.[16][14] Losev was a lonely researcher who never had a co-author; he attended some university courses but never completed a formal education.[1]

In Nizhny Novgorod he also discovered, in 1924, the photoelectric effect in illuminated carborundum; in 1925–1926 a method of transforming the frequency of oscillations, which he called "transgeneration"; and in 1927–1928 the capacitive photoelectric effect in semiconductors — the conversion of light into electricity on which solar cells are based.[2][7] In August 1928, when the writer Maxim Gorky, a native of the city, visited the laboratory, it was Losev who showed him round the laboratory and workshops.[15]

Leningrad and death

When the Radio Laboratory was reorganised in December 1928, its themes and many of its staff were transferred to the Central Radio Laboratory in Leningrad, where Losev worked as a senior laboratory assistant and from 1933 as a senior engineer; from 1929 to 1933, at the invitation of Abram Ioffe, he also did research at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute, and from 1937 he worked at the First Medical Institute.[7][2][16] In 1938 he was awarded the degree of Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences for the body of his work, without defending a thesis.[8][1] In an autobiography of 12 July 1939 he wrote that "with semiconductors a three-electrode system can be built, analogous to a triode".

Whether this work anticipated the transistor is disputed: the Nizhny Novgorod museum sees in it a step towards the transistor, the historian of electronics Yury Nosov denies any link between the crystadyne and the transistor, and Nature Photonics notes that his last paper, finished in November 1941, never reached the journal, so that "we shall never know for certain unless his manuscript is found".[7][23][1]

The German invasion of 1941 found Losev in the physics department of the First Leningrad Medical Institute. He refused to be evacuated from the besieged city, developed a heart stimulator, a portable device for finding metal shrapnel in wounds and a fire-alarm system, and, despite a stomach ulcer and poor food, gave his blood as a donor. He died of starvation on 22 January 1942; the place of his burial is unknown.[7][2]

Recognition and memory

For decades Losev was remembered mainly by specialists. In 1957 Abram Ioffe acknowledged his "indisputable merits" in the use of semiconductors to detect and generate radio waves.[21] His wider rediscovery began in Nizhny Novgorod: in March 2003 the city hosted a scientific conference for the centenary of his birth, whose papers were published in the journal Physics of the Solid State, and in 2006 Lobachevsky University published a collection about him, Ahead of the Time. In 2007, the centenary of Round's note, Nature Photonics, drawing on the Nizhny Novgorod research, together with New Scientist and the trade magazine Compound Semiconductor brought Losev's work on the LED to Western readers.[2][1][25][22]

Losev is one of the remarkable, interesting and complex figures in the history of Russian radio electronics. In fact, he touched the very foundations of modern semiconductor technology!

The laboratory's building at 5 Verkhne-Volzhskaya Embankment (Верхне-Волжская набережная, 5), on the high bank of the Volga in the centre of Nizhny Novgorod, houses the museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory". It opened on 7 May 1974 as a memorial room and in 1998 became part of the museum of Lobachevsky University.[17][18] In 2022 the museum installed a stand demonstrating LEDs, which presents the electroluminescence of semiconductors as discovered by Losev in 1923; in May 2023, for the 120th anniversary of his birth, it opened an exhibition from its collections and held its tenth scientific readings, dedicated to Losev and to the 105th anniversary of the laboratory.[19][7][20]

See also

Sources

  1. Nature Photonics — Nikolay Zheludev, "The life and times of the LED — a 100-year history", vol. 1, no. 4, April 2007, pp. 189–192; author's copy: Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton (archive)
  2. Physics of the Solid State — M. A. Novikov, "Oleg Vladimirovich Losev: Pioneer of Semiconductor Electronics (Celebrating One Hundred Years since His Birth)", vol. 46, no. 1, January 2004, pp. 1–4; proceedings of the conference dedicated to O. V. Losev, Nizhny Novgorod, 17–20 March 2003 (archive)
  3. Fizika Tverdogo Tela (Ioffe Institute) — M. A. Novikov, "Oleg Vladimirovich Losev, a pioneer of semiconductor electronics", Russian original of the previous paper, 2004, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 5–9 (in Russian; archived copy)
  4. Radio News — vol. 6, no. 3, September 1924: Hugo Gernsback, "A Sensational Radio Invention", p. 291; "The Crystodyne Principle", pp. 294–295, 431 (archive)
  5. The Wireless World and Radio Review — October 1924: O. Lossev, "Oscillating Crystals", no. 271, 22 October 1924, pp. 93–95 (archive)
  6. patents.su — USSR patent No. 12191 "Light relay", O. V. Losev, application of 28 February 1927 (in Russian) (archive)
  7. Museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory", Lobachevsky University — "120 years since the birth of Oleg Vladimirovich Losev, an outstanding scientist and inventor in semiconductor electronics", 4 May 2023 (in Russian) (archive)
  8. Museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory" — leaflet "Oleg Vladimirovich Losev, 1903–1942", 2023 (in Russian) (archive)
  9. Museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory" — series "Nizhny Novgorod, the Capital of Radio", issue 2: 1918 (in Russian) (archive)
  10. Museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory" — series "Nizhny Novgorod, the Capital of Radio", issue 6: 1922 (in Russian) (archive)
  11. Museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory" — series "Nizhny Novgorod, the Capital of Radio", issue 7: 1923 (in Russian) (archive)
  12. Museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory" — series "Nizhny Novgorod, the Capital of Radio", issue 8: 1924 (in Russian) (archive)
  13. Museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory" — series "Nizhny Novgorod, the Capital of Radio", issue 9: 1925 (in Russian) (archive)
  14. Museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory" — series "Nizhny Novgorod, the Capital of Radio", issue 11: 1927, quoting E. T. Krenkel's memoir RAEM Is My Call Sign (in Russian) (archive)
  15. Museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory" — series "Nizhny Novgorod, the Capital of Radio", issue 12: 1928 (in Russian)
  16. Virtual Computer Museum — Yu. R. Nosov, "O. V. Losev, inventor of the crystadyne and of the light-emitting diode: for the centenary of his birth", reprinted from the journal Elektrosvyaz, 2003, no. 5 (in Russian) (archive)
  17. Museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory" — "General information" (in Russian) (archive)
  18. Museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory" — "History of the museum" (in Russian)
  19. Museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory" — "A new demonstration stand in the NRL museum", 16 May 2022 (in Russian) (archive)
  20. Museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory" — "Anniversary scientific and practical readings in the museum", 25 May 2023 (in Russian)
  21. Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk — A. F. Ioffe, "Research on semiconductors in the Soviet Union", vol. 63, no. 3, November 1957, pp. 527–528 (in Russian)
  22. Compound Semiconductor — F. Schubert and J. K. Kim, "Light-emitting diodes hit the centenary milestone", 15 October 2007 (archive)
  23. Elektronika: Nauka, Tekhnologiya, Biznes — Yu. Nosov, article on the history of semiconductor electronics, no. 3, 2008, pp. 129–130 (in Russian) (archive)
  24. Museum "Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory" — series "Nizhny Novgorod, the Capital of Radio", issue 5: 1921 (in Russian) (archive)
  25. New Scientist — Tom Simonite, "LED — older than we thought", Technology blog, April 2007 (archived copy)