Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED

LEDs don't get their color from their plastic covers and you can see that because here is a transparent LED that also glows the same red color the color of the light comes from the electronics themselves the casing just helps us tell different LEDs apart in 1962 general electric engineer Nick holac created the first visible LED it glowed a faint red a few years after that engineers at Monsanto created a green LED but for decades all we had were those two colors so LEDs could only be used in things like indicators calculators and watches if only we could make blue then we could mix red green and blue to make white and every other color unlocking LEDs for every type of lighting in the world from light bulbs to phones to computers to TVs to Billboards but blue was almost impossible to make throughout the 1960s every big electronics company in the world from IBM to GE to Bell Labs raced to create the blue LED they knew it would be worth billions despite the efforts of thousands of researchers nothing worked 10 years after hak's original LED turned into 20 then 30 and the hope of ever using LEDs for light faded away according to a director at Monsanto these won't ever replace the kitchen light they'd only be used in appliances car dashboards and stereo sets to see if the stereo was on this might still be true today if not for one engineer who defied the entire industry and made three radical breakthroughs to create the world's first blue LED shuji Nakamura was a researcher at a small Japanese chemical company named Nish they had recently expanded into the production of semiconductors to be used in the manufacturer of red and green LEDs but by the late 1980s the semiconductor division was on its last legs they were competing against far more established companies in a crowded market and they were losing tensions started to run High younger employees begged Nakamura to create new products while senior workers called his research a waste of money and at nishia money was in short supply nakamura's last mainly consisted of Machinery he had scavenged and welded together himself phosphorus leaks in his lab created so many explosions that his co-workers had stopped checking in on him by 1988 nakamura's supervisors were so disillusioned with his ...