Today we celebrate our 17th year in business offering LED lighting options across Canada. As we look back on these 17 years, we are reminded of how LED lighting came to be, and how far the technology behind it has come. Let’s take a walk through history as we learn about how LEDs have changed the lighting industry today.
H.J. Round, a British experimenter working at Marconi Labs, was testing silicon carbide (a crystal) with electric current when he noticed a faint glow. Prior to this, light was created using incandescence or electrical discharges to excite gases (Tomas Edison heated carbon, later tungsten until it glowed). However, due to no one seeing a use for it yet, the idea faded out.
Russian Scientist Losev created a tiny device that lit up using the same electroluminescent technology from H.J. Round. He imagined the technology being used in radios. However, due to electronics being too primitive to make practical at the time, no one has touched his work for 30 years.
Nick Holonyak Jr. who was working at General Electric, created the first visible red LED using gallium arsenide phosphide as a semiconductor. Prior to this, infrared was not visible to the human eye. Holonyak is often called the Father of the light-emitting diode, and he imaged one day all light bulbs being replaced by LEDs someday.
George Craford, student to Holonyak, improved upon Holonyak’s work and made red LEDs 10x brighter. He also developed the first yellow LED which expanded the colour spectrum of LEDs closer to being useful in lighting.
Japanese scientists Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Makamura worked on the first blue emitting LED light using gallium nitride (GaN). With their discovery, blue light was now able to entre the colour spectrum to create white light using red, green and blue. In 2014, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for their contribution to light-emitting diode technology.
Although still expensive to produce, LED technology was slowly introduced into small displays for digital watches, and remote controls. They slowly moved into larger displays for TVs, traffic lights, and headlights. Due to their small size and ability to save on energy, they boomed in popularity causing prices to drop allowing people to purchase them for their homes.
17 years ago, AALED began operation. We became the first to have the UL/CUL certificate on our tubes, which then became standard across Canada. Now we offer various lighting options for any space and have worked with various companies to improve their lighting needs.
