An Interesting (and short) History of LCD Screens

It took two hands to tell the time

Sitting at home today watching the World Cup on a 54″ high def flat screen monitor that hangs on the wall in my living room, and writing on an Apple laptop that has a flat screen monitor, we have come to accept these things as almost second nature.

How we got there, however, is an interesting story.

I have learned all of this from reading a lovely book entitled The Battery, by Henry R. Schlesinger. And while it looked like a history of the battery when I bought it, it turns out to be more a history of electronics, the battery simply being a small part of that revolution.

As you cannot tell the story of the history of electronics without the battery, so too can you not really get to where we are today in electronics and portability without the flat screen monitors that are now so ubiquitous. Imagine carrying around a laptop with a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) screen on it.  Imagine a 54 inch home TV set with an accompanyingly large CRT behind it. It would take up half the living room.

Yet this technology, these flat screens, which inhabit and make possible everything from laptops to iPads to iPhones and much to come, came to us in a fairly strange and novel way.

The portability that the invention of the transistor and it’s descendant, the computer chip, would have been far more limited had there not been a concurrent invention of an equally light and portable display mechanism – the LCD or Liquid Crystal Display.

The LCD began as far back as the late 19th Century, when the Austrian botanist, Friedrich Reinitzer discovered that cholesteryl benzoate crystals turned cloudy or clear at very specific temperatures.  The observation lay dormant, no more than a scientific curiosity, until the early 1960’s when RCA began to pick up the thread.

RCA scientists discovered that the crystals not only responded to temperature, but also to electromagnetic fields. And if you dyed the crystslas, y0u could get them to change color in a predictable way.

But RCA’s main business was manufacturing those giant cathode ray tubes that were the heart of television sets and, like most big corporations, was reluctant to engage in anything seemingly so far afield.

Now, (and this is the interesting part), a Japanese documentary film crew, making a TV show about RCA called Firms of the Modern World” Modern Alchemy shot a segment with Dr. George Heilmeier, an RCA scientist working on the liquid crystal project.

A year later, an engineer at Sharp Electronics in Japan saw the TV show and realized that the LCD technology might be applicable to Sharp’s number one product – hand held calculators.

RCA proved uncooperative, and so the Japanese technicians got hold of a videotape of the show and watched Heilmeier’s demonstration over and over.  They were able to analyze his lab and see what bottles of chemicals he was using by watching the background carefully, frame by frame.  A bit like Blow Up, they were able to recreate his results in Japan from watching the tape.

In May 1973, the Sharp Corporation introduced the Elsi Mate EL-805, the word’s first calculator with an LCD screen.  The most advanced readout technology at the time was the Canon Pocketronic, which had a thermal paper (remember those) under a magnifying glass to give the results instantly.

At around the same time, the Hamilton Watch Company released the ‘Pulsar’ (above), which I remember – the world’s first ‘digital’ watch, also using an LCD screen to show the time.  The cost of a Pulsar on release:  $2,100, or about $10,000 today.

It cost $10,000 to ‘read’ four digits, only in red: 07:29

At that price point, my Sony plasma screen would cost billions.

But it doesn’t.

And one may project that as the Pulsar is to my Sony Plasma Screen today, so too will the Plasma Screen be to something far more cost efficient, in the next few decades.