How many people does it take to change the lightbulb? One: Shuji Nakamura - inventor of so-called solid-state white lights made from light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
In 1992, while working in the laboratory of an obscure Japanese chemicals company, located on the smallest and least populated of the four main Japanese islands, this lone engineer triumphed where multinational research centres 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 which produces any tone of white immediately (unlike today's low-energy fluorescent lights).
Nakamura's breakthrough is at the heart of a technological revolution that looks set literally to light up the world. Within a decade, LED-based lighting is likely to be a familiar feature in homes and offices, cutting fuel bills and greenhouse gas emissions.
Its impact on developing nations will be even more significant, by bringing light to the 2bn people for whom the setting of the sun means being plunged into darkness, or having to rely on oil lamps. High-efficiency LEDs running off stored solar power can keep the lights on until dawn.
Nakamura was recently awarded the second Millennium Technology Prize the first winner was Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
But it could easily have never happened at all, as technology writer Bob Johnstone shows in this compelling account of Nakamura's story, packed with salutary lessons for would-be Edisons.
"Don't follow the pack" is one tip. Nakamura pursued a route no-one else thought would work - though his reasons for doing so are instructive. As Johnstone points out, blue LEDs had first been made in the early 1970s, but were hopelessly faint. That prompted researchers to throw their efforts into other approaches.
As a lowly research engineer with Nichia, in rural Japan, Nakamura took the view that if they were now on the right track, he didn't have a chance of beating them - so he opted to stay with the material they had abandoned, known as gallium nitride (GaN).
It was not an argument that appealed to Nichia's president, who - perhaps understandably - ordered Nakamura to stop wasting the company's money and start work on sure-fire products. In the grand tradition of tales of geniuses versus plodders, Nakamura ignored the order from the boss and discovered a means of turning GaN into LEDs emitting dazzling levels of blue light, 50 times brighter than achieved by anyone else.
The initial response to Nakamura's claims was scepticism: few thought so big a breakthrough could come from so small a company. The first to recover from the shock was Cree, a US-based LED maker, which quickly sought a collaborative venture with Nichia. The response provides one of the many cultural insights of the story: "They were like, Gaijin [foreigner] go home," one Cree executive told Johnstone.
Riled by the dismissive attitude, Cree then became the first of many to try poaching Nakamura. The sources of these offers gives another intriguing cultural insight. Whatever initial doubts there had been about Nakamura's brilliance, they soon evaporated as he followed up the blue LED with the first bright green and white LEDs, and the blue laser (now at the heart of the Blu-ray video machines). Yet while 10 US institutions tried to poach him, only two offers came from Europe - and none at all from his home country.
In the end, Nakamura took up a professorship at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Nichia responded by trying to sue him for breach of nondisclosure agreements. The case was kicked out in 2002, by which time Nakamura had launched his own action against his former employer. It emerged he had received just US$200 for each patent granted on his products - whose sales topped $1,4bn in 2001. Nakamura sought about $17m as his fair share - barely 1% of the sales. He was ultimately awarded only half that amount, which was swallowed up by legal fees.
In the end, Nakamura has something beyond price: a place alongside the likes of Edison as technologists who have changed our world. But his story suggests that while it took just one person to change the light bulb, there is no shortage of people who came close to stopping him doing it.
Financial Times
