Shuji Nakamura And The Most Important Company You’ve Never Heard Off

In November 1993, the lighting industry was lit on fire when an undistinguished engineer named Shuji Nakamura working at a chemicals company called Nichia announced he’d created the world’s first practical blue LED light. While few outside this sector took notice, industry experts knew something that would change the world was born. The remarkable part is Shuji was working mostly alone and up to this point had almost no notable accomplishments to his name.

But why did industry experts get excited in the first place? What made LED’s so special that it won a Nobel Prize in 2014?

The answer turns out to be a lot of things. For starters, LEDs are amazingly efficient. Modern day ones convert around 50% of electrical energy into light. The numbers for both incandescent and fluorescent bulbs are much lower (at around 5% and 25% respectively). They also last significantly longer at 25,000 hours. Again, the numbers for both incandescent and fluorescent bulbs are much lower at around 1,200 hours and 8,000 hours respectively. Topping this off, they can be made without toxic chemicals and don’t go out instantly but gradually fade over time.

Not only are they used to light up homes and streets, they are also used in devices like smartphones and laptops. Yes, unless you haven't updated your phone or computer in several years, you're probably watching this on an LCD display backlit with LEDs.

The story of this incredible innovation dates back to the 1960s when Nakamura was growing up. As a young boy, he didn’t have many toys so he built his own. Being good at physically building things would serve him well in his later quest to unravel LEDs. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, scientists James Biard, Gary Pittman and Nick Holonyak built the world’s first practical red and green LED’s. However, without blue, there would be no way to create white light hence LEDs were confined to niche uses.

Fast forward to the early 1970’s when Nakamura was wrapping up school, Herb Maruska and Wally Rhines built the first blue-violet LEDs. However, there was a problem – they were too dim hence not very useful for providing light.

Attempts continued but it wasn’t until the early 1990’s that Nakamura burst onto the scene. After a decade-long career working at Nichia, he had very little progress in any field to show. Most of his previous work either failed or if they succeeded technically - weren’t differentiated enough to be commercialized. Due to this, some of Nichia's older employees thought he should have been fired since in their view, he was just wasting the company’s money.

Despite all these setbacks, he continued to make progress himself and then had the audacity to ask Nichia’s owner for 2% of the company’s revenue – equivalent to more than 3 million dollars in 1990’s money - to finish his work. Although that might seem like a lot of money, it was hardly a realistic budget for a project like this. The equipment, training and resources he needed was barely covered and he couldn’t afford to get the direction wrong. This gives you an idea of how expensive scientific research can be.

His direction was to use a base material called Gallium Nitride – widely considered by then to be unfeasible. But because he wanted to create something the company would find easy to patent and sell, he took a chance on this approach.

After toiling away, experiencing nerve racking explosions and solving seemingly incomprehensible problems, Nakamura finally managed to build the first practical blue LED. He was 39 years old at that time.

While he started his accomplishments relatively late, what followed was a brilliant phase of productivity. Shuji improved the efficiency of LED’s, found a way to lower the cost by cleverly manipulating temperature to grow the crystals used in their production, combined the colors to make white LED’s and followed that up with the invention of Blue Lasers in 1996. And yes, Blue LEDs and blue lasers were pioneered by the same person. For those who’ve wondered why Blu-ray players have “Blu” in them, it’s because of the blue lasers used.

The invention was so remarkable that as late as 2002, people thought practical blue LEDs were impossible. In this Reddit post, an instructor explained why Blue LEDs were impossible nearly 10 years after they were invented. Yet can you imagine the reaction of everyone in the class when something like that was bought before their eyes?

On a side note, Nakamura eventually tried to sue Nichia over compensation. He alleged the company made a fortune through LED sales. This was true. He also stated he got hardly any part of that fortune despite doing the work. This was also true. However, the company counter argued that it provided a gigantic sum of money to fund his research in the first place even though he didn’t have a history of accomplishments and by the time Shuji resigned, he was already one of the company’s highest paid employees.

Nowadays LEDs are a huge industry touching almost every aspect of modern life. The benefits for consumers in the developed world include cheaper electricity bills and longer lasting phone and laptops. But for the world at large, it’s something much more. Almost a quarter of the world’s electricity consumption is for lighting purposes. If the world switched to LEDs, this could mean more energy saved than is produced by both solar and wind power combined.

While some of you are watching this from the comfort of your homes, more than 1 billion people today don’t have access to stable electricity. Due to their high efficiency, LEDs can easily be powered through solar cells and batteries. This could not only give these people access to electric lighting but do something much more important. Around 3 million people worldwide develop health problems if they resort to methods like burning kerosene for light. Access to LEDs and solar cells would help alleviate this.

Going even beyond this, imagine you’re visiting an uncontacted tribe. If you were to capture the sun's rays with solar panels, store it in batteries, then release the light at night with LED’s, wouldn’t that seem like magic?

The key takeaway here is that developing a new technology and showing it works isn't enough. Any new technology must meet 3 criteria to become mainstream. First, they must be safe. Second, they must be durable and last a reasonably long time. Finally, they must be affordable. And those are just the bare essentials. For LEDs, they must also be bright and efficient at converting electricity into light. For a different technology often getting media buzz like batteries, they would need to charge quickly and not wear out when charged repeatedly among other factors. The 3 points of safety, durability and affordability cannot be stressed enough. So next time you see amazing innovations being announced, you can be enthusiastic but always approach it with a healthy dose of skepticism.

As LEDs came to fit those criteria, some have called it the most game changing invention of the past half century. The great achievement in science and technology is rarely coming up with an idea, not even inventing it but rather making the invention fulfill all necessary criteria to become something that can change our lives.