While it may seem that LED lights have just come into fashion in recent years, they have actually been in existence for several decades.  In fact, the first light-emitting diode was discovered in 1907 by a British experimenter, Henry Round of Marconi Labs, who first realized a semiconductor junction could produce light.  Subsequently, in the mid 1920s, a Russian named Oleg Vladimirovich Losev invented the first actual LED light and published his achievement in Russian, German and British scientific journals.  These were important initial steps in LED’s growth, but were ignored for several more years.  Additional relevant findings were noted in the 1950s and early 1960s but it wasn’t until 1962 that the first practical visible-spectrum LED was actually developed by Nick Holonyak Jr., who is often regarded as the “father of the light-emitting diode” for this invention while working for the General Electric Company.

By the late 1960s, the first LEDs were available in commercial markets, but only in red. They were initially used solely as replacements for incandescent indicators in laboratory and electronic equipment, but soon became widely recognized on household and office appliances such as TVs, radios, telephones, calculators and wrist watches.  Since the initial light output of these red LEDs was very low, at that point they could only be used as indicators rather than actual sources of light.  Soon, however, more colors were created and overall efficiency was improved.

In 1972, M. George Craford, a former graduate student of Holonyk, created the first yellow and red-orange LEDs, as well as a new red that was 10 times as bright as the original.  In later years blue LEDs were created by a Japanese corporation, which eventually led to the development of white LEDs so commonly seen today.  Along the way, materials technology advanced significantly, stimulating rapid improvement in light output, efficiency and reliability, allowing LEDs to finally become bright enough for illumination.

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