The blue LED's stubborn chemistry earned a Nobel Prize

Red and green LEDs existed by the 1960s, but creating full-color displays and energy-efficient white light required blue LEDs, which eluded scientists for three decades. The hurdle was growing high-quality gallium nitride crystals. In the early 1990s, Shuji Nakamura, Isamu Akasaki, and Hiroshi Amano cracked the material synthesis. Their perseverance earned the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics, revolutionizing modern lighting and smartphone screens with an energy savings of up to 90 percent.

Sources

• The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 - Popular Informationnobelprize.org ↗
• Light-emitting diodeWikipedia ↗