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History

In the early 20th century, Henry Round was the first to conclude a material that has electrical conductivity between an electrical conductor and insulator and a semiconductor would produce light.

Later in the early 1920's a Russian Oleg Valdimirovich Losev independently created the first L.E.D. His research was recorded but ignored.

In 1961, two experimenters Bob Biard and Gary Pittman, of Texas Instruments, reported that gallium arsenide gave off infrared radiation when an electric current was applied.

The "father of light-emitting diode", Nick Holonyak Jr., developed the first visible spectrum L.E.D. In 1972, M. Gorge Craford, invented the first yellow L.E.D. which was 10 times brighter then the red L.E.D.'s.
Shuji Nakamura of the Nichia Corporation used indium gallium nitride, another type of semiconductor, to demonstrate the first blue L.E.D.

The creation of this blue L.E.D led to the first white L.E.D. This is a mixture of the yellow light with blue that produces light that appears white.