Once assembled, LCDs are fragile, can often only be viewed within a very narrow angle and then only in perfect ambient light. Many technologists feel that an easier to make and more robust alternative system could usurp LCDs. Which is where the glowing plastics come in. The conducting polymers studied in the 1970s and 1980s were simple affairs. Simply a strand of carbons linked by conjugated double bonds.
Appearances are often deceptive though.
The conjugation can endow the polymer with excitable electrons give them a kick with UV or an electric current and they become agitated, leaping to higher energy levels, when they drop back down photons are ejected. If these photons have the right wavelength we see a glow. This remarkable property was not lost on bright sparks at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Physicists Jeremy Burroughes, Donal Bradley and Richard Friend figured that electroluminescent polymers might be used to make tiny light-producing electronic components. The fact that they would be plastic might make them less fragile than inorganic semiconductor materials chipped off synthetic crystals.