The Inventor of LED
When Nick Holonyak set out to create a new kind of visible lighting using semiconductor（半导体）alloys（合金），his colleagues thought he was unrealistic. Today，his discovery of light-emitting diodes，or LEDs，is used in everything from DVDs to alarm clocks to airports. Dozens of his students have continued his work，developing lighting used in traffic lights and other everyday technology.
On April 23，2004，Holonyak received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize at a ceremony in Washington. This marks the 10th vear that the Lemelson-MIT Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology（MIT）has given the award to prominent inventors.
"Anytime you get an award，big or little，it's always a surprise，"Holonyak said.
Holonyak，75，was a student of John Bardeen，an inventor of the transistor（晶体管），in the early 1950s.After graduate school，Holonyak worked at Bell Labs. He later went to General Electric，where he invented a switch now widely used in house dimmer switches. Later，Holonyak started looking into how semiconductors could be used to generate light. But while his colleagues were looking into how to generate invisible light，he wanted to generate visible light. The LEDs he invented in 1962 now last about 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs，and are more environmentally friendly and cost effective.
Holonyak，now a professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics at the University of Illinois，said he suspected that LEDs would become as commonplace（平凡的）as they are today，but didn't realize how many uses they would have.
"You don't know in the beginning. You think you're doing something important，you think it’s worth doing，but you really can't tell what the big payoff（成果）is going to be，and when，and how. You just don't know. “he said.
The Lemelson-MIT Program also recognized Edith Flanigen，75，with the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award for the work on a new generation of "molecular（分子）sieves（滤网）"that can separate molecules by size.
【第7题】LEDs are more environmentally friendly than incandescent bulbs.
