You’ve Never Heard of Nick Holonyak, But You’re Looking at His Most Famous Invention Right This Very Minute
It’s high time that Nicholas Holonyak Jr. is given his due.
You’re probably saying, “Who?” To which I say, case in point. He’s an inventor of something that it’s not outlandish to say is within your eyesight every second of every day, even in the last seconds before you close your eyes to sleep. Everyone knows Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Holonyak should receive the same treatment, since he, in a way, invented the modern equivalent. Though not his only invention, by far Holonyak’s most impactful is the first visible-spectrum LED, or light-emitting diode, in 1962.
After all, pretty much every light bulb you buy today is packed with LEDs anyways, a cross-generational collaboration between Holonyak and Edison himself.
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These days, if something emits light, it’s likely Holonyak’s creation is behind it, both literally and figuratively. Your phone, your computer screen and the lights on its side. When your TV is on, you’re staring at a massive array of LEDs, and when it’s off, it’s still an LED that tells you so. They’re so completely ubiquitous that the phrase “count the LEDs you see in a day” could be a sci-fi refitting of “counting grains of sand on the beach.”
You’d think that illuminating the world would be enough for a Nobel Prize, but there, again, Holonyak finds himself snubbed. Adding insult to injury, other inventors have received Nobel Prizes for products built off of his work. How are you going to award one to the inventors of the blue LED without honoring the man who made it possible?
It’s not because his story is boring either. It’s the kind of sequence of events that feels custom-built for a science textbook’s glossy pages — Holonyak competing with better-equipped rivals, pursuing processes that he was told were impossible. Finally landing on the light-emitting diode was a mixture of happy accident and rewarded confidence.
As if the LED itself wasn’t impact enough, methods he found while working on it were central in the discovery of something else world-changing: the lasers used in DVD players. It wasn’t even his only lasting contribution to the world of lighting: He also invented the dimmer switch.
Unfortunately, the chance for Holonyak to personally receive the widespread credit he deserved is no more. He passed away two years ago in 2022. A time at which we had plenty of evidence just how much we owed him. Hopefully, he could take some solace that even if our civilization was left a bombed-out remnant of itself, visitors or future inhabitants would find what he invented dotting every part of our daily life.
