Make Magazine has produced a great documentary on the history of LEDs. It turns out the Light Emitting Diode was discovered by accident, during an experiment at Marconi labs. The documentary shows you how to recreate that initial experiment yourself, if you are so inclined. Maybe if we all get together, we can make an LED display bigger than the one in front of that Walgreens in Times Square, NYC.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin has just unveiled Stallion, the world’s highest resolution tiled display. The beast clocks in at 307 million pixels, which is considerably larger than the previous record holder of 220 million pixels.

The thing was designed to study diminutive cells. The system boasts 75 Dell 30-inch LCDs, each of which features a native resolution of 2,560 x 1,600. It also has 36GB of graphics memory, 108GB of system memory and a whopping 100 processing cores. Just imagine playing Unreal Tournament on this thing.

This is one dangerous POV display. It’s called the "Display from Hell" and the name makes sense once you realize that while this display projects POV images using 100 blue SMD LEDs, it also features a propeller that could chop your arm off.

The propeller spins at 140mph. It’s huge and terrifying and after you watch this "making of" movie, you may just have nightmares about it. At least they’ll feature a large smiley face.

The long-anticipated 17,000-square foot LED display has finally gone live in front of a Times Square Walgreens today. The heart of New York City is blaze with the unit, which touts over 12 million LEDs. The board was designed by a company called D3 LED, who claim that it’s one of the most complex LED displays in existence. It might be worth taking a gander at when you come up to the city to stare at the equally large tree at Rockefeller center.

Below is a CGI demo of the display in motion that was made in order to drum up financial support: