The media, academia and the electrical/electronic community agree that Nick Holonyak Jr., Ph.D., is “the father of the LED.” The son of Eastern European immigrants, Holonyak decided, after a grueling 30-hour shift on the Illinois Central Railroad, that pursuing higher education was preferable to a career in the rail yards. Holonyak earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois in the early 1950s.
In 1962, while working at General Electric Co., he developed the first practically functional visible-spectrum LED device for commercial use. It is simply a LED device and is far away from LED lamps, such as LED downlight, nowadays. He also invented the semiconductor laser, and co-developed the first dimmer switch, among other things. He holds 41 patents.
Holonyak realized LEDs had the potential, if produced under the proper conditions and with the right chemical compositions, to provide a semiconductor light source for a variety of uses, ranging from high-tech industrial and research applications to aircraft night vision to automobile brake lights.
The consumer press as well as academic journals discovered Holonyak and showcased his work early on. In a 1963 Reader’s Digest article, he forecast with remarkable prescience—and not a little panache—that LED lighting would someday supersede the ubiquitous incandescent light bulb in the American household.
More recently, a 2003 Chicago Tribune article about Holonyak’s achievement states: “The economical and reliable devices critical to DVD players, bar-code readers, and scores of LED-related consumer products today owe their existence in some way to the demanding workload thrust upon one particular Illinois railroad crew decades ago.”
So how does this background information help us today?
Professional LED Lighting Knowledge blog to promote the usage of LED Lamps
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