The Youtube Channel Veritasium has a fascinating little documentary on the engineer Shuji Nakamura, who, during the early 90s, invented the Blue LED, a task which was once thought impossible, and he did it while working at Nichia, a small Japanese semiconductor company. On the back of his invention of Blue LEDs, the company quadrupled in size and made nearly $400 Million in Blue LED sales alone. They gave him $170 per patent.
