Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED

LEDs are the result of electricity passing through very specific chemical crystal configurations and the first two (red and green) were relatively obvious to find, but creating blue was an extreme undertaking. Lots of big companies tried for years to get it right, but eventually a rogue Japanese scientist, ignoring the commands of his bosses, toiled day and night pursuing configurations of elements long declared to be dead-ends, using his own custom crystal baking machine, cracked the code and figured out a way of doing it in a commercially viable way.

Of course, as is expected in these stories, the company tried to give him $175 and a $60k salary for his efforts, but in a pleasant surprise he sued for 8mill and now has hundreds of patents and is pursuing nuclear power as his next goal