The first LED was built by Soviet inventor Oleg Losev in 1927. In 1955, Rubin
Braunstein of the Radio Corporation of America reported on infrared emission from
gallium arsenide (GaAs) and other semiconductor alloys. The first visible-spectrum
(red) LED was developed in 1962 by Nick Holonyak, Jr. while working at General
Electric. Blue LEDs were first developed in 1972 using gallium nitride (GaN) on a
sapphire substrate. The first high-brightness blue LED was demonstrated by Shuji
Nakamura of Nichia Corporation in 1994 and was based on InGaN. In parallel, Isamu
Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano in Nagoya were working on developing the important GaN
nucleation on sapphire substrates and the demonstration of p-type doping of GaN.
Nakamura, Akasaki, and Amano were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics for
their work.