Nick Holonyak Obituary, Funeral

Nick Holonyak Jr. was an American engineer and educator best known for his 1962 invention of a light-emitting diode (LED) which emitted visible red light instead of infrared light.

Holonyak came up with the invention while he was working at General Electric’s research laboratory in Syracuse, New York.

Born to e Rusyn immigrants on November 3, 1928, Holonyak earned his bachelor’s (1950), master’s (1951), and doctoral (1954) degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

From 1955–1957, Holonyak served with the U.S. Army Signal Corps and from 1957–1963, he was a scientist at the General Electric Company’s Advanced Semiconductor Laboratory in Syracuse, New York, where he demonstrated the LED on October 9, 1962. The LED emitted visible red light instead of infrared light.

In addition to introducing the III-V alloy LED, Holonyak held 41 patents.

His other inventions include the red-light semiconductor laser, usually called the laser diode (used in CD and DVD players and cell phones) and the shorted emitter p-n-p-n switch (used in light dimmers and power tools).

In 2006, two of Holonyak’s papers made it to the American Institute of Physics’s top five most important papers in each of its journalssince it was founded 75 years ago.

• The first one, co-authored with S. F. Bevacqua in 1962, announced the creation of the first visible-light LED.
• The second, co-authored primarily with Milton Feng in 2005, announced the creation of a transistor laser that can operate at room temperatures.

Holonyak predicted that his LEDs would replace the incandescent light bulb of Thomas Edison in the February 1963 issue of Reader’s Digest, and as LEDs improve in quality and efficiency they are gradually replacing incandescents as the bulb of choice.

Holonyak died on September 18, 2022, in Urbana, Illinois, at the age of 93. Details regarding his funeral arrangements will be made public in due course.