Dubai, UAE; October 10, 2012: Fifty years ago, 33-year-old GE scientist Dr. Nick Holonyak, Jr., invented the first practical visible-spectrum light-emitting diode (LED), a device that GE colleagues at the time called “the magic one” because its light, unlike infrared lasers, was visible to the human eye.

https://www.invent.org/inductees/nick-holonyak-jr

The story of science and technology today is the story of many hands. But try as we might, it’s hard to get away from the hero narrative. It’s still easy for us to get swept up by the tales of lone inventors, who battle the powers-that-be and fight against all odds to prove themselves right.

The stories that we tell about the development of the blue LED are no exception. The hero has long been Shuji Nakamura, one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Nakamura, working “virtually alone” for a small, geographically remote company called Nichia Chemical Industries, was responsible for developing manufacturing processes that brought the first truly bright blue LEDs to market. He’s since become the face of the device.

The thing is, it’s hard to say if any of this would have happened without the efforts of a number of others, in particular his two fellow awardees, Isamu Akasaki and Akasaki’s former student, Hiroshi Amano.

Although Nakamura’s company was the first to begin selling blue p-n junction LEDs, they soon faced competition by a company working with Akasaki: Toyoda Gosei.

Nichia became “embroiled in a bitter patent war” with Toyoda Gosei and launched “an energetic public relations campaign” to brand Nakamura as the father of the blue LED, Lécuyer and Ueyama write.

Read more: http://reefbuilders.com/2014/10/10/blue-led-nobel-prize/#ixzz3G5jadb9k

Given the Nobel Foundation’s statutes (three people at maximum, no posthumous awards), it’s almost inevitable that every year, there will be people who deserve a share of a Nobel Prize that are left out.

Nick Holonyak Jr., the person widely credited with the development of the first visible-light LED

Nobel Shocker: RCA Had the First Blue LED in 1972 – IEEE Spectrum
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/geek-life/history/rcas-forgotten-work-on-the-blue-led