Nick Holonyak Jr., an electrical engineer who became known as the progenitor of the led lighting that illuminates flat-screen TVs and laptop computers, and who also developed lasers that enabled DVD and CD players, bar code scanning and medical diagnostic devices, died in September. The man was 93.
His alma mater, the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, announced his death at a nursing home, where he had died. The State Farm Center arena was red the day after his death to honor his invention.
Professor Holonyak predicted that fluorescent lamps, which use ionized gas, would be replaced by LEDs, Semiconductor chips the size of a grain of sand.
The current itself is the light, according to Professor Holonyak.
The LEDs use less energy and last longer. They are less harmful to the environment than fluorescent lamps. According to the Department of Energy, by the end of the decade, LEDs will account for more than 80% of all lighting purchases and will reduce Americans' electric bills by $30 billion a year.
Bob Johnstone, a technology journalist and the author of "L.E.," said that Nick Holonyak invented the first visible LEDs and predicted that they would eventually replace electric lighting.
Hiroshi Amano of Japan and Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara won the prize in physics for their development of a high-brightness blue-light-emitting diodes. Professor Holonyak's invention of a red light emitting device explains why displays on alarm clocks and calculator were red for a long time.
He said that Holonyak was a pioneer, visionary and a great scientist. It was a travesty of justice that he didn't get a share of the prize because of the narrow criteria the committee uses to award it.
The director of the Center for Compound Semiconductors at the Georgia Institute of Technology said that Professor Holonyak was passed over for the physics prize twice.
The 2000 prize for discovering low-energy laser technology was shared by the German American Herbert Kroemer and the Russian Zhores I.
On the 50th anniversary of Professor Holonyak's discovery, Mary Beth Gotti said that he is a national treasure. Thousands of students and countless innovations have been inspired by his curiosity.
Professor Holonyak's parents were immigrants from what is now WesternUkraine. He was a coal miner.
Nick Jr., the first in his family to receive a formal education, became fixated on electricity when he helped his father fix his car's spark coil. He abandoned manual labor after one 30-hour stint repairing flood damage when he was 15.
The cheap and reliable Semiconductor lasers critical to DVD players, bar code readers and scores of other devices owe their existence in some small way to the demanding workload thrust upon downstate railroad crews decades ago.
At the University of Illinois extension campus in Granite City, he did not want to switch to chemistry from electrical engineering.
"I told him that chemistry was too much like cookbook learning, too many recipes to learn, and I was more interested in electrical science," he was quoted as saying.
He earned degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois in the 1950s. He was the first graduate student of John Bardeen.
Professor Holonyak was married to a woman in 1955. He is the only one who is still alive right now. He finished his military service in 1957.
He used to work at the Advanced Semiconductor Laboratory in Syracuse, New York.
He told General Electric that he was an engineer and not a chemist. The chemists at G.E. told me that I couldn't do that with my light emitting device. It wouldn't work if you were a chemist. I said that I just did it and it worked.
The University of Illinois endowed a professorship in his name in 1963. The transistor laser research center was run by Professor Holonyak and another person.
He won many awards for engineering and technology, including the Global Energy Prize, the National Medal of Science and Technology, and the Draper Prize.
He worked side by side with graduate students in a windowless office and lab, shunning computers and calculator and parrying the theoretical abstract that dominates the world of physics. He tinkered with solutions to everyday problems.
He told the host of NPR's "Tech Nation" in 2012 that he wasn't taking a sabbatical because he was living in the playground and playing with an idea.
Craig helped report.
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