Oleg Vladimirovich Losev-->
The old saw goes, "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?"
Of course it does, but without an ear to hear it, the existence of the tree goes unremarked. So apparently do a lot of vital scientific discoveries made decades, perhaps even centuries before we become aware of them and incorporate them into our technological development.
The science of genetics was delayed by 50 years, as Gregor Mendel's experiments with peas languished in a forgotten document until rediscovered in 1906. Now apparently, we find out that much the same state of affairs occurred with the LED, or light-emitting diode.
While LEDs were reinvented in 1962 by as many as four independent research groups, historical research shows that Henry J. Round, an assistant to Guglielmo Marconi, published a reference to his discovery of LEDs in 1907 in a trade magazine called "Electrical World". Over in Russia, some twenty years later, a more exhaustive study and theoretical basis was produced by Oleg Vladimirovich Losev, who published a series of 16 papers on the phenomenon in several important British, German and Russian journals between 1924 and 1930. Losev died in the siege of Leningrad which was a tragedy beyond his death from starvation--Losev had completed a paper on the transistor; the foundational technology of digital electronics, twenty years before its rediscovery by American scientists.
Losev never had any formal education, or achieved any professional acclaim and success. As the scion of a noble family, he endured persistent discrimination in Bolshevik Russia where he never rose about the position of a technician.
Losev was effectively the victim of the same left-wing ideological impulse that brought us "affirmative action". No royalty or white males need apply. The irony of course is that it is the nation that endures the punishment for racism, class warfare, political correctness and other forms of non-merit based discrimination.
What would the world look like today if the Russians had a social, political and economic climate that would have let Losev's genius flower into practical applications? The entire information age might have happened decades earlier than it did, and with Russia at its center.
There is a lesson here for the North Koreans, Iranians and other would-be super powers: Real power comes from fully realizing the human potential of a nation's citizens, not from nuclear weapons.
The left might also want to pay attention since no cultural and political ideology has done more damage to the prospects of western nations than socialism and its attendant lunacies.
Will we ever learn?
