First LED Demonstration

Date: October 9, 1962 • Location: Washington, United States

Nick Holonyak, an engineer for General Electric, gave the first public demonstration of a light-emitting diode.

Nick Holonyak Jr. was an American electrical engineer. He is noted particularly for his 1962 invention and first demonstration of a semiconductor laser diode that emitted visible light. This device was the forerunner of the first generation of commercial light-emitting diodes (LEDs). He was then working at a General Electric research laboratory near Syracuse, New York. He left General Electric in 1963 and returned to his alma mater, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he later became John Bardeen Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics.