Like every great invention, LED lights took a long time to be invented and marketed to the world. This is because mankind tends to reject any innovation that they can’t understand, and it may take them a decade or so to realize just how essential the invention is. Russian inventor Oleg Losev created the first LED light in 1927, but nothing was done about the research until much later. Although Oleg had published his discovery in Soviet, German, and British scientific journals, his research remained unnoticed until the mid-1990s. In 1939, Zoltan Bay and Gyorgy Szigeti created the first-ever type of LED and patented the device.
The LED in its real form was finally created in the late 1950s, and by the 1960s, only the red-colored light was available. This was the time when William Shockley filed a patent for an infrared LED, and Nick Holonyak created the first practical visible-spectrum LED. This was just the start. In 1968, Hewlett-Packard began to use LEDs in calculators. Furthermore, more experiments were made with LED colors, and M. George Craford invented the first-ever yellow LED in 1972. However, it wasn’t until 2006 that a white LED was created by Shuji Nakamura. This discovery led him to win a Millennium Technology Prize. It also changed our lives since the white LED can now be spotted in kitchens worldwide. By 2019, homes all over the world had switched to LED lighting.
Under The Harvest Moon 