History of National LED Light Day
Many people would think that LEDs are a more modern invention, but the idea has been around since Henry Ford revealed the Model A in 1927. The Russian scientist Oleg Lesev published his findings on the possibility of LEDs in 1927 after visualizing a greenish light emission by passing a current through a semiconductor. Lesev was the first to investigate the possibility of LEDs and their practical uses, but his research wasn't put to actual use for several decades.
It wasn't until the mid-60s that useful LEDs, developed by GE engineer Nick Holonyak, were put to use by IBM on circuit boards for an early computer. These early LEDs were very basic and couldn't produce the wide range of colors of light we see today from LEDs. These early LEDs were only capable of emitting colors like green, red, or yellow. It wasn't until the late 80s/early 90s that scientists were finally able to create a practical blue-emitting LED. This was a huge discovery for the technology because creating a blue LED stumped scientists for many years.
These new blue LEDs would become the foundation for today's common LED light we use in many applications. Once a blue-emitting LED was invented it didn't take long for scientists to develop a white-emitting LED in the late 90s as we see in many lighting fixtures today. The scientists Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura who helped advance blue-light LEDs into white-light LEDs would later be awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions towards creating the modern LED lights we use today.
National LED Light Day was finally recognized on October 7, 2016. It was created to commemorate all of the inventors who had a hand in developing LED Lighting into the widely used, energy-efficient lighting source we have today. National LED Light Day occurs every year on October 7th.
Below you can see just how far LED technology has come by browsing through all of our categories. We have everything from single-chip diodes like the basic LEDs IBM used in their early computers to large high-voltage industrial area lights and wifi-controlled smart lights capable of millions of colors.