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Ten years ago mobile phones were the size of bricks, as heavy as a bag of sugar and the property of only the very rich. Now they are everywhere, smaller than a credit card and lighter than a Mars bar. But what shrunk the mobile phone, and how come we all have one? Join Tony as he explores the chemistry that connects people and asks what does the electronic chemistry have in store for us? Professor Tony Ryan These things always ring at the wrong times, don't they! What drives this modern icon? [Tony proceeds to smash phone with hammer.] [Tony holds up old 'Motorola' phone followed by modern mobile.] You see, your mobile phone has lots of different parts. So, what's in here? Well, what was in there? [Tony holds up individual components of phone.] Have I lost it? Oh no, here it is. But most importantly there were these things. These here, these are silicon chips. You see when I was a kid, oh, we've a hand up here, what are they? [Vacuum tubes]. Vacuum tubes, more commonly known as valves and these valves powered radios and televisions and the difference between those and these is obvious, it's the size. [Lightning flash/sound of thunder.] [Archive photo of Michael Faraday on screen.] You see, electricity's everywhere. It's all around us, it's in our bodies. So, what is this magic called electricity? [Demonstration showing effect of 'arcing'.] You're going to see them - jumping - whoa! [Demonstration continues - a bulb is lit by electrons.] And here is another demonstration of electrons. These are in a plasma and they'll even light this bulb. The activity of those electrons makes this part of the bulb light up too. I'm going to need some volunteers to help me find out. [Volunteers make their way down.] So, what's your name? [Sukina]. [Children demonstrate conduction using various materials.] So there's a contact and there's a contact, right - and if we have conduction, the lights'll go up. Oh, and how many lights have gone on? All of 'em! [Yeah]. So, thank you very much. [Applause] No, no, no, you two boys get to stay. This is a piece of polythene. Yeah, no lights have come on, have they, because this is an insulator, it doesn't like to conduct. Thank you all very much. [Applause.] [Tony demonstrates a simple circuit.] So here we have a simple circuit. You see the insulator's useful. It's got copper wire inside. But it's got an insulator wrapped around the outside, so when I touch this copper wire, I don't get a shock, so you don't want to be touching live wires at all, because they'll give you a shock, so don't do that when you're at home, you have to be careful with electricity. So in this simple circuit, I've got a source of electrons and when I make the circuit, by making this connection with a switch, the light comes on. [Tony holds up a mobile phone.] You see, I can use this on/off to send a signal. So, let's say I've gone out climbing with my mates and we've got stuck up the mountain. Morse code, brilliant. [Table with 'string' of numbered lights is wheeled in.] So here I've got a string of lights. And each one of them can be on or off. [Tony demonstrates by switching lights on and off.] And with these eight lights I can encode two hundred and fifty six numbers. Seventy-two in the binary code is zero, one, zero, zero one, zero, zero, zero, right. So this method of encoding information is actually very efficient, the binary code. Professor Tony Ryan [Black-and-white still picture of the first transistor on overhead screen.] There's a picture of the first transistor, it's a switch with no moving parts and to make a switch like this, you need to be able to change one of those insulators that we saw before into a conductor. And I'm going to need some volunteers to help me do that. They were given hats on the way in, right, so put your hats on. Hats, hats, hats, there should be ten red hats and some blue hats. [Volunteers file down to the floor wearing blue and red hats.] Down you come, blue hats here, red hats there. [The overhead screen shows children demonstrating the process by using balls as electrons.] They don't have enough free electrons to be conductors, but if you start to put electrons in, there's a big enough field, then some of their electrons will be pushed off and they'll start to conduct. Notice how slow it is compared to the conductor we saw earlier. [Volunteers are used to demonstrate transistor 'gate'.] Now you're the first electron in this chain, aren't you? I want you to come round this side, this side. Put your hands here. Next one, in you come. Have a quick knock on the door, knock, knock, knock, let me in, can we push? Now this revolutionised the radio industry, because transistor radios were born and they relied on a transistor to be an amplifier and we've just amplified three electrons into one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven electrons, or is it ten? At the heart of your mobile phone there are these silicon chips and these are basically circuits connecting millions of transistors and these gates, just like the gate we saw control the flow of electrons. Well over here, this instrument is called an atomic force microscope. The transistors are so small that we can't see them with the naked eye. [Shot of transistors as seen through a microscope on overhead screen.] And this works like a blind man. So the way the microscope works is you put the transistors underneath and there's a tip that taps up and down and the sample, the silicon chip is moved underneath, so you can see the wafer being scanned in here and it's moving backwards and forwards and the tip's tapping up and down.[Tony taps stick on board to demonstrate tip tapping.] [Close-up shot of the tip of the stick on the overhead screen.] Now the edge of the tip is an atom. So here we can see an image. On here are the chips for a multitude of mobile phones and I'll show you how they do it. [Tony demonstrates process using stencil and spray paint.] So, what you have to do is make a pattern.And then through that pattern change the silicon in the wafer from being an insulator into being a conductor. So you have your pattern and your - spray. So we can make a circuit just by doing printing. So let's try it now. We've made the circuit and the lights come on, conducting through the track we made. Thank you Bipin. [Applause.] [Series of graphics on overhead screen showing miniaturisation process.] At the moment, silicon chips are halving in size every eighteen months and the reason for this miniaturisation is our ability to make the gaps between the tracks smaller and smaller. But there's a problem, we can't make the track any smaller than a single polymer molecule we use to make the pattern and at the current rate of progress, we'll hit that limit in about fifteen years time. So for now we've seen the heart of the mobile phone and shortly we'll see all those parts come together to make it work. [Applause.] [Tony rides into lecture theatre on battery-powered scooter.] So, we've looked at the heart of the mobile phone and how electricity's used to store and transmit information and in this part we're going to look at the source of this power. Whoa-oh! The hot date part doesn't happen to me very often. But the phone going dead does, and it's not fair to blame the technology. [Battery is wheeled in on table.] So, Bipin's going to help me by putting it together. [Close-up shot showing archive black-and-white drawing of Volta.] And it was made by an Italian, Alessandro Volta and it's a series of plates with something in between that's soaked in a liquid and - can you hear it start to fizz? I can, and it smells shocking! So, we're almost ready now. The last one goes on. [Lecture theatre lights dim.] And the connection gets made. [Battery light glows.] Stacks of different metals and a liquid, yeah. And Volta's batteries don't last very long.[Laughter.] Thank you Bipin. [Applause.] [Tony demonstrates 'lemon' batteries being used to a power calculator.] This calculator is powered by a battery made from a series of lemons. So, to make a battery, you need two different metals and they're called the electrodes. Right, off it goes. I put the different metal in, on it comes. This battery works the same way. I like that joke! [Laughter] OK, Bipin - now he came running in to stop me spoiling the floor, because this is Faraday's lecture theatre and the words 'electrolyte' and 'electrode' were invented in this building. So what we need is a way of making a battery that we can recharge. [Tony demonstrates system of recharging batteries.] So, this young man here. OK, what's your name? [Robert]. So we have a yellow liquid and a blue liquid. So these batteries are very heavy, generally, like the scooter I came in on, seventy per cent of its weight is the battery. So we'll close the valve now, right, and so you've gone home, this is like your mobile phone, you've plugged it in to recharge it and energy comes out of the plug in the form of electricity. And that's what this pump is. Does your phone gurgle as much as that when you recharge it? [No]. Professor Tony Ryan This one, let me just read it. It's a rechargeable nickel metal hydride battery. Yeah, you've got a lithium iron battery, OK, you're going up market a bit, so are you. Wow!! So don't put them away yet, but you can put the batteries back in. So we've seen now how circuitry and batteries have become smaller and smaller. So we need a display for the information. And it has to be small, it has to be light, so - this is heavy. What we need is a liquid crystal display. And here's an example. [Small girl volunteer squats down behind large LCD screen.] Oh, you look like you'll be a great volunteer for this one, right. What we need to do is bend down, so you can see this milky thing here. You're not even going to stick your tongue out? [OK]. [Volunteer sticks tongue out.] What a rude girl! Right, what happened? Thank you very much for helping me. [Applause.] You see the screen has something inside that sometimes is opaque and sometimes is clear and it's a liquid crystal molecule. [Tony catches ball which has been thrown from above.] And they are shaped like a rugby ball and they're sandwiched in between the two pieces of glass. You see, sometimes these liquids that are shaped like rugby balls are arranged at random and sometimes they all point in the same direction. You see, we can line them up, using electricity. So we'll have you and you and you and you, thank you. [Laughter.] [Applause.] You see, you guys, you're going to become the liquid crystal molecules. I'd like you to come over here, right. If you stand just here and you come the other side of her - there you go, I want you to hold that, this is going to help you be a liquid crystal. Now, sometimes you point in one direction and then we put the electric field on and you turn that way and you become clear. And then when we turn the field off, you turn back again. Marvellous! I'll take these off you and say thank you very much indeed - [applause] - and you can go back to your seats. But that display I showed you wasn't actually all that useful. And the way that's done, in your phones is with something called a twisted nematic display. [Tony puts on Polaroid sunglasses.] And they rely on polarisers, just like these, right. [Volunteer wearing white top is used as screen.] So I just need you to act as a screen, so if you turn this way, OK - so here's a polariser and here's another polariser and you can see through them. If I rotate them, then they become opaque. So, thank you very much, we saw that quite clearly, I think. [Applause.] So we've seen the technology that drives your mobile phone and we've literally changed the world of communication and in the next part, we'll look into the future. So what will the communication of the future look like? Professor Tony Ryan You see, we can have pictures like this on our current handsets, but we couldn't watch things that stream. You see, in silicon, we're approaching the limit. [Light fills the lecture theatre.] You see, electricity isn't the fastest thing on the planet, light travels much more quickly, so why don't we use that instead? [Close-up shot of optical fibres.] And these optical fibres are just like these. When you make that phone call from your house, the first part of the message goes down copper and then at the exchange it's turned into light and it travels all the way to the USA, not as electrical pulses, but as light pulses and I'm going to show you how. So here we have a wave guide and that's what the copper does, so here's your phone call as it goes down the cable. ... You can see it's a series of flashes - noughts and ones. So how is it done? And then when we get to the other end, the colours are separated and they zoom under the sea at three hundred thousand kilometres a second and when they get there that light's converted back into electrical energy. And the same technology allows us to turn an image into electricity. Now we all know that light's a mixture of colours and each colour we perceive is a distinct wavelength, or frequency, a segment of the whole spectrum. To carry the information around the world, the optical cables rely on light being split into more than just its basic seven colours. Did you learn this at school? 'Richard of York gave battle in vain.' Yeah? And they're the words we use to describe the colours, but if you have optics that are very good, you can break white light down into many, many more colours than that and that depends on their wave length. So if we're going to move information around quickly on a phone network, why not apply the same principle when we build computers? So if we're going to replace the silicon chip with a much faster optical chip, then we can literally process information at the speed of light, so there's a challenge in making materials that nature gets there first, every time. [Tony holds up a frame with mounted blue butterfly.] So this beautiful butterfly appears to be blue. So we need to be able to make materials that can control light and here's an example from Sheffield. [Close-up shot of blue liquid in container.] So this is a brightly coloured liquid, right, you can see it's a liquid, because it's flowing and the colour comes from, not the fact that the molecules are coloured, but that it's manipulating the light. So if we put a spoon of the liquid in the base here and squeeze down the top, we get something that's actually bright green. Can you see the green colour? You see, when you got your mobile phone out and it had an LCD display, that's why the battery runs out, it consumes a lot of power and it consumes power in the back light, the thing that makes it - come on. You see, what we need to do is use light emitting devices, light emitting diodes. The first LED's were red, like this one and they were made from a compound of gallium and arsenic, called gallium arsenide. When you mix the colours, red, blue and green, you can make white, just like we see in the middle of the screen now. These LED's are much more efficient at transforming electricity into light than a bulb. [Tony stands by set.] The future of displays and lighting is here. The power consumption's so low. Look over here at the set. Here is an array of LED's. There's lots of them and their power consumption, the amount of electricity needed to drive them is less than a bulb. If we could convert every traffic light in the UK to work in an LED's we'd save enough electricity to power a large city and we'd have to put far less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So LED's are the future, but really the future is LED's made from plastic, because it's cheap and disposable. So they emit light and the UK's a world leader in this technology and the roll-up TV is just around the corner. So what about things that take light and convert them into electricity? [A large solar panel is carried into lecture theatre.] This solar panel is the current state of the art. And what this is, is a big LED running backwards, but you don't get that much power out of them and they're big and heavy, that's what it needs these two big lads! Whereas, this device that's running this clock, this is a polymer LED. And it's much, much better at converting the light into electricity. And we'd never need to get beaten at cricket again! [Laughter.] So - Annie's going to come on and put something into this oven. So, what we did earlier was we can transfer this digital image to make ourselves some mementos of this immensely successful lecture! [Tony holds up T-shirt with picture taken earlier standing by jumbo mobile phone.] You see, I'm going to get a new T-shirt which has the picture we took earlier. And Annie's going to come and recover her mobile phone, which has had printed on it - yeah, the same picture. [Applause.] Thanks Annie. To get this picture of me on this T-shirt and mobile phone cover, we've had to convert light into electrons and then those electrons into a binary code. We've used that to make an image with dyes and then we've transferred those dyes onto this T-shirt and onto the phone back. [Applause/music/credits roll.] |
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