GE Made The First LED You Could See. The Nobel Went To Someone Else.

On October 9, 1962, at a General Electric lab near Syracuse, a 33 year old engineer named Nick Holonyak Jr. made a tiny crystal glow red. It was the first practical LED you could see. The chemists around him had said his way of growing the crystal was impossible. Fifty two years later, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to the inventors of the blue LED. Holonyak, then 85, told the Associated Press: "Hell, I'm an old guy now. But I find this one insulting." This is the story of the coal miner's son who made the first visible LED, the race of 1962, and how a 260 dollar red dot replaced Edison's light bulb. In this documentary: Why light meant a hot wire in a glass bulb for 80 years How an LED makes light, explained with a staircase Why the first commercial LED (Texas Instruments, 1962) was invisible The 1962 race between GE, IBM and MIT Lincoln Lab to build a semiconductor laser Nick Holonyak, John Bardeen's first graduate student at Illinois The alloy the chemists said couldn't be grown October 9, 1962, and "the magic one" From 260 dollars to four cents: Monsanto, HP, calculators and watches George Craford and the first yellow LED The blue LED, the 2014 Nobel Prize and the word "insulting" How Edison's bulb left American shelves in 2023 Watch the story of the MOSFET, born in the same Bell Labs world as Holonyak's mentor John Bardeen: [add link to "Is This The Most Manufactured Thing In Human History?"] Should the Nobel have gone to the person who made the first visible LED, or to the people who made it bright enough to light a room? Tell me in the comments. And if I got a date, a number or a name wrong, tell me there too. I read every comment and I pin corrections. Parts That Changed History tells the stories behind the chips, machines and parts that shaped the modern world, and the people who built them. Subscribe for a new story every day. #LED #NickHolonyak #GeneralElectric #Nobel #BlueLED #Semiconductor #ElectronicsHistory #TechHistory #Invention #Engineering #Electronics #Documentary #History #PartsThatChangedHistory