"The Long Bright Path to the Nobel Prize for LED Lighting"

"Here’s to the continual intellectual tussles that produce technological leaps like the super-efficient and durable LED light bulbs that are increasingly displacing incandescent and fluorescent bulbs (and sooty kerosene lamps) and garnered a Nobel Prize for three physicists on Tuesday.

Dennis Overbye provides a nice overview of the award in The Times, as does the Nobel Prize website. The physicists, two from Japan and one from the University of California, Santa Barbara, were lauded for creating a blue light-emitting diode in the early 1990s to complement existing red and green diodes (only with those three colors can white light be generated).

The physics prize has swung in past years from honoring basic scientific advances to rewarding inventors for breakthroughs with broad societal value. "

Andrew C. Revkin reports for Dot Earth in the New York Times October 7, 2014.