Nakamura gallium nitride blue LED development

Enabled white-light LEDs; saved trillions in lighting energy. Predicted in the 1950s.

LEDs — what's the secret to an LED? A guy [Nakamura] who is Japanese made good quality gallium nitride. You could predict back in the 1950s gallium nitride could produce blue light. We already had red and green; we used to make stop lights out of GaAs LEDs thirty years ago. But when he came up with the process of making gallium nitride to make blue light, you could get white light, and that has saved how many trillions of dollars in energy costs for lighting in the world. NASA will take credit for the gallium arsenide.