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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, or1 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.

“Any time 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.

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