Inventor of LED
When Nick Holonyak
set out to create a new kind of visible lighting using semiconductor alloys, his
colleagues thought he was unrealistic. Today, his discovery of light-emitting
diodes, or LEDs, are used in everything from DVDs to alarm clocks to airports.
Dozens of his students have continued his work, developing lighting used in
traffic lights and other everyday technology.
On April 23, 2004,
Holonyak received the $,500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize at a ceremony in Washington.
This marks the 10th year that the Lemelson-MIT Program at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) has given the award to prominent
inventors.
"Anytime you get an award, big or little, it’s always
a surprise," Holonyak said.
Holonyak, 75, was a student of John
Bardeen, an inventor of the transistor, in the early 1950s. After graduate
school, Holonyak worked at Bell Labs. He later went to General Electric, where
he invented a switch now widely used in house dimmer switches.
Later, Holonyak started looking into how semiconductors could be used to
generate light. But while his colleagues were looking at how to generate
invisible light, he wanted to generate visible light. The LEDs he invented in
1962 now last about 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs, and are more
environmentally friendly and cost effective.
Holonyak, now a
professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics at the University
of Illinois, said he suspected that LEDs would become as commonplace as they are
today, but didn’t realize how many uses they would have.
"You
don’t know in the beginning. You think you’re doing something important, you
think it’s worth doing, but you really can’t tell what the big payoff is going
to be, and when, and how. You just don’t know," he said.
The
Lemelson-MIT Program also recognized Edith Flanigen, 75, with the $100,000
Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award for her work on a new generation of
"molecular sieves," that can separate molecules by
size. |
