How one man showed them the light

Brilliant! Shuji Nakamura and the Revolution in Lighting Technology By Bob Johnstone Prometheus Books, $28, 336 pages

How many people does it take to change the light bulb? One: Shuji Nakamura, inventor of so-called solid-state white lights made from light-emitting diodes, commonly known as LEDs.

In 1992, while working in the laboratory of an obscure Japanese chemical company, located on the smallest and least populated of the four main Japanese islands, this lone engineer triumphed where multinational research centers had failed. He created an LED that emitted dazzling blue light, the key step to mimicking sunlight itself.


When combined with a simple yellow phosphor coating, the result is a source of white light needing five times less power than the equivalent light bulb, lasting more than 10 times longer, and it produces any tone of white immediately