Then and Now: The History of Display and LED Technology

With all of the advancements being made in display technology, it’s hard to believe that the knowledge used to create and develop this technology is over a hundred years old. In fact, the first baby steps into the field of display technology began as far back as 1897 when Karl Ferdinand Braun, a physicist and inventor, built the first Cathode-Ray Tube. This small tube would enable the very first televisions to be built and create an industry that has advanced in leaps and bounds from its humble beginnings.

The second major break in display technology came ten years after Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1907 with the discovery of Electroluminescence. This naturally occurring phenomenon would provide the first breakthrough for LED technology. 1952 saw the development of the very first curved screen display, and was installed in only a handful of movie theaters across the country. That technology would not be available to consumers for over fifty years.

The next big step forward in display history was the invention of the first LED bulb in 1961. Robert Biard and Gary Pittman patented the first infrared LED light for Texas Instruments. The very next year Nick Holonyack produced the first visible light LED. Two years later, in 1964, display technology took another leap with the invention of LCD and Plasma screens by American inventor James Fergason.

Even though touchscreen smartphone displays are relatively new technology, the first of these displays was invented as early as 1965 and was first used for air traffic controllers. Similarly HDTV really gets its start in Japan during the 1960s and 1970s, even though HDTVs don’t reach the U.S. until 1998. By the time you get to displays in the 90s, OLEDs have been invented by Kodak and we have the first full color plasma displays.

Incredibly, the display industry has rapidly expanded and will continue to do so. Displays of various sizes, forms and technology will be developed for diverse applications. With it the necessity for accurate display testing systems will grow considerably as well. Konica Minolta has a number of display measurement systems available to meet the ever-changing needs in the display industry.

Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) came into being in 1962 and for the first decade were mostly red in colour. Nick Holonyak invented the first practical LED in 1962, when he was at General Electric.The first practical LED Screen was produced and introduced at Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 1968. The production was led by Howard C. Borden, Gerald P. Pighini, and Mohamed M. Atalla, an Egyptian engineer at HP Associates and HP Laboratories, who had engaged in R&D on functional LEDs between 1962 and 1968. They launched the HP System 5082-7000 Numerical Indicator in February 1969. It was the first LED device to use an integrated circuit (integrated LED circuit) technology and the first smart LED Screen, making it a revolution in digital display technology, replacing the Nixie tube and becoming the basis for subsequent LED Screens.

Earlier versions were planned to be monochromatic. The powerful Blue LED finishing off the color triad did not appear commercially until the late 1980s.

Aluminum Indium Gallium Phosphide LEDs had appeared in the late 1980s. They provided an effective red and amber source and were used in displays of information. Complete color was still difficult to achieve though. The "black" available was barely black at all-mainly yellow, and an early blue had excessive power consumption. It was only when Shuji Nakumura, then at Nichia Chemical, announced the production of the Indium Gallium Nitride-based blue (and later green) LED, that possibilities for large LED video displays were created.

Mark Fisher 's concept for U2 's 1997 "Popmart" tour gave an early shake-up to the entire notion of what could be achieved with LED. He realized that small pixel spacing could be used to produce very large images with long viewing distances, especially if viewed at night. The system needed to be ideal for touring, so that an open mesh structure was used which could be rolled up for transport. The entire show was 52 m long and 17 m (56 ft) tall. It's had 150,000 pixels in total. The company that supplied the LED pixels and their driving system, Montreal's SACO Technologies, had never previously built a display system, creating mimic panels for control rooms at power stations.

Wide screens today use diodes of high-brightness to produce a wide variety of colors. It took Sony three decades to launch an OLED TV, the Sony XEL-1 OLED panel, which was launched in 2009, and organic light-emitting diodes. Earlier, at CES 2012, Sony introduced Crystal LED, a true LED-based TV in which LEDs are used to create real images rather than as backlight for other display types, as in LED-backlit LCDs typically known as LED TVs.