History of the LED

Since 1907, the phenomenon of electroluminescence was discovered by the British experimenter H. J. Round of Marconi Labs. During 1927, the first infrared LED has been reported and distributed in Russian, German and British scientific journals by a Russian Oleg Vladimirovich Losev. In 1962, the first practical visible-spectrum Red LED was developed by Nick Holonyak Jr., at General Electric Company. Holonyak becomes the "father of the LED". During 1972, his student, M. George Craford, invented the first yellow LED and improved the brightness of red and red-orange LEDs. Thanks for Monsanto Company, the first organization to mass-produce visible LEDs by using gallium arsenide phosphide (GaAsP) in 1968; Hewlett Packard (HP) introduced the first LEDs alphanumeric display into their HP’s early handheld calculation in 1970s. Blue LED New Era of Blue LED with Shuji Nakamura, a Tokushima University graduated on Chemistry, worked in the Nichia Company which was a very small in supply fluorescent material to the TV manufacturing in 1960s. Nakamura San has invented the first high brightness GaN-based blue LED, together with the phosphor coating for white LED lighting, and which went into production in 1993. Nakamura managed to develop a new method for mass production of GaN based blue LED. With Nakamura contribution, now everyone can buy a MOCVD system which works like you baking oven in your kitchen for blue LED wafer. But, of course, there are only a few chefs for Make Right recipe for good Blue LED in the world. Shuji Nakamura is now recognized as “guru of the Blue LED”. His researches have been international awards: the Harvey Prize from Israel’s Technion (2010); Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (2008); Finland’s Millennium Technology Prize (2006); and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in the engineering segment (2004), previously conferred upon Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein. Nakamura has also received Japan’s Takeda Award, as well as an Innovation Award from UK magazine The Economist. Now you can see LED everywhere…Thanks to these gentlemen who has been contributed their researches on LED… One of the top 10 Inventions in 20 Century. Article was written by Ringo Tse and Edited by HK Snob