Presto Electro

Prize-driven technological advancement is not a new concept; the $25,000 "Orteig Prize" was first proposed in 1919. It is widely held as the first example of such "incentivized competition", but the prize itself is basically unheard of. The strange thing is, it was single-handedly responsible for Charles Lindbergh's legendary solo-flight across the Atlantic Ocean, AND commercial aviation as we know it (by extension).

I'm sorry for going off on an airplane tangent, but I just saw Amelia and the history of flight is fresh in my mind. In slightly more current news, the "X Prize" Foundation has offered similar incentives for space flight, with similar results. The original X Prize, known as "The Ansari X Prize for Suborbital Spaceflight", awarded $10 million dollars, but it resulted in over $100 million invested in spacebound research.

Last May the US Department of Energy announced the first government-sponsored technological competition: The L Prize. According to lightingprize.org, the competition "challenges industry to develop replacement technologies for two of today's most widely used and inefficient technologies: 60W incandescent lamps and PAR 38 halogen lamps." In plain English: The Department of Energy wants a better light bulb. Not only that, they're offering $10 million bucks to the first person to develop one.

As it happens, The University of North Texas has been working on just such a thing! Teams from the chemistry department and the materials science and engineering department have collaborated to investigate and perfect Organic Light Emitting Diodes, or OLEDs. OLEDs are 10 times more efficient than incandescent light bulbs, and also require much less energy to produce in the first place. This sort of solid-state lighting is exactly what the L Prize is all about.

If you'd like to know more about UNT's OLED research, check out this article from Research Magazine, Volume 18, Number 1.