Nick Holonyak Jr., who made an LED breakthrough, dies at 93

[emrr]

Nick Holonyak Jr., whose development in 1962 of the first practical visible-spectrum light-emitting diode, or LED, proved a breakthrough that now has countless practical applications, including lightbulbs, mobile phones, TV sets and microscopic surgical equipment that can save lives, died Sept. 18 in Urbana, Ill. He was 93.

“It’s a good thing I was an engineer and not a chemist,” he said in a 2012 GE interview. “When I went to show them my LED, all the chemists at GE said, ‘You can’t do that. If you were a chemist, you’d know that wouldn’t work.’ I said, ‘Well, I just did it, and see, it works!’ ”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/21/nick-holonyak-led-illinois-dead/

 

[JohnRoberts]

I recall the early LEDs being expensive and not very efficient... In any color you wanted as long as it was red.

LED lighting is now practical.... How quickly we forget the almost constant need to replace burned out incandescents.

RIP

JR

 

[57sputnik]

More on Holonyak and early Monsanto LED development at Datamath.org DATAMATH

"One of Holonyak's doctoral students at the University of Illinois was George Craford, who joined Monsanto in 1967 as a research physicist. During the early 1970s, Craford and his team at Monsanto were working on a version of GaAsP, modified by nitrogen. That led to the first yellow and to improved red LEDs. Bell Labs produced greens with nitrogen-doped gallium phosphide using liquid-phase epitaxy. Monsanto, using vapor-phase epitaxy, an extension of Holonyak's work, made orange and high-brightness red. This effort didn't go very far at first, because Monsanto's marketing department reported that the only color customers wanted was red. Customers used red displays for calculators, so their only concern was getting cheaper LEDs. Marketing never considered other LED applications. Its conclusion that red was the only color wanted may have stemmed from asking the wrong question or asking the wrong people.

An early 1970s Monsanto application note for LEDs: https://www.ka-electronics.com/images/pdf/Monsanto_GaAsLite_Tips_Vol-1_1970.pdf