In the early 20th century, Henry Round working out of Marconi Labs first noticed that a semiconductor junction would make a light source. Russian Oleg Vladimirovich Losev was the first one to crate a LED on his own in the mid 1920s; his research, though distributed in Russian, German and British scientific journals, was ignored. Rubin Braunstein working out of the Radio Corporation of America reported on infrared emission from gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductor and of other semiconductor alloys in 1955. Experimenters at Texas Instruments, Bob Biard and Gary Pittman, found in 1961 that gallium arsenide semiconductor would give off infrared radiation when an electric current was applied to it. Biard and Pittman were able to establish the priority of their work and received the patent for the infrared light-emitting diode. Nick Holonyak Jr., working out of General Electric Company at that time and later working with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, developed the first practical visible-spectrum LED in 1962 and is seen as the “father of the light-emitting diode”. Holonyak’s former graduate student, M. George Craford, invented the first yellow LED and 10x brighter red and red-orange LEDs in 1972.


Shuji Nakamura working out of Nichia Corporation of Japan demonstrated the first high-brightness blue LED based on InGaN, borrowing on critical developments in GaN nucleation on sapphire substrates and the demonstration of p-type doping of GaN which were developed by I. Akasaki and H. Amano in Nagoya. The existence of the blue LED led quickly led to the first real white LED, which worked thru a Y3Al5O12:Ce, or “YAG”, phosphor coating to mix yellow light mixed with blue to produce light that appears white. Nakamura was awarded the prestigues 2006 Millennium Technology Prize for his invention with is now days common technology and used world wide.