Pickle Lighting For Fun And Profit

2oct09_mitpickle (Custom)

The fantastic people at MIT have taken it upon themselves to explain how an OLED works. Their visual aide in this explanation is an electrocuted pickle. This helps describe how OLEDs are actually constructed from organic material.  Many of you probably already know how they work, but for those who don’t this video will clear up any questions you might have. Even if you do know how OLEDs work, you may learn something too. We hadn’t realized how amazingly thin the displays are.

[via Engadget]

19 thoughts on “Pickle Lighting For Fun And Profit

  1. Ah, and oldie but a goodie. I remember reading about the glowing pickle experiment back in the day in Penn and teller’s book “How to Play with your food…

    Boing boing did a thing on it back in 2006. You just hook up straight ac current to probes in the pickle, and the brine and pickle flesh does the rest. Scary stuff really.

    http://www.boingboing.net/2006/08/31/howto-make-a-glowing.html

    I wonder if you could make pickle lighting more efficient with some kind of brine enclosure and something like a lime-light arc lamp setup… or would that just cause the pickle to explode? Either way, lots of fun. Oh and because it’s lacking today.. Arduino FTW!

  2. @T&P: You do know that technology moves forward, right? Do you think someone just pooped out a perfect CRT without drawbacks on the first try? Hell they didn’t even have more than one colour back then.

  3. @T&P: Yeah, I’ve never seen a faded, distorted, blurred, misaligned, or otherwise failing CRT. They just last forever and ever without failing. I even heard it told that they don’t really use power, the wall plug is just there so they don’t scare people with their awesome, magic powers.

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