How The Blue LED Changed The World

Our world is lit by LED light that’s so ubiquitous that we don’t even notice it anymore. Buy a piece of audio gear and all the indicators are LEDs. Buy a new lamp or light bulb and it’s now composed of LEDs, but did you know that the key to the omnipresent LED lighting comes from the blue LED?

The Light Emitting Diode was accidentally invented by two Texas Instruments researchers trying to create a laser LED. That first LED was infrared (as used today in your television controller), but visible red came short after and was soon followed by the green variety. While they worked great as incandescent indicator lamp replacements, that’s where their usefulness ended.

If you wanted white LED light, then you needed a blue LED, but that was much more difficult to create than anyone expected. In fact, it took 30 more years until a researcher at a small Japanese chemical company called Nichia finally was able to grow the key ingredient – gallium nitride – in a lab.

Once a blue LED is created, then it doesn’t take much to turn that into white, and today we have big powerful LEDs that are far brighter than the incandescent and even halogen bulbs of the past that consume less power and last 100 times longer. Plus the white bulbs are widely available in different color temperatures, something almost unheard of in everyday life unless you were working in video or film lighting.

The influence of the blue LED on modern society has not gone unnoticed. In 2014 the trio of scientists who worked on the device were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.

The following video by Bloomberg takes us through the history of LEDs and especially how the blue LED was developed.

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