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  L.E.D. L.E.D.

  A History of the Future of Lighting

  Bob Johnstone

  To my readers — whoever, wherever, and whenever you are

  C O N T E N T S

  Introduction 7

  P A R T I: Better Bulbs

  Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Only One Girl To Dance With 15 Making the Case 33 Low Hanging Fruit 45 A Cautionary Tale 57 Politics of Light 67 And the Winner Is 84 When Your Horse Is Dead 101

  P A R T II: Future Fixtures Chapter Eight Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Bright Lights, Big City 117 Chip Heads vs Metal Benders 132 Many Hands 144 The Borg’s Response 159 The Lamp Shade Is the Lamp 173 What Comes Next 188

  P A R T III: Beyond Mimicry Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Crossing the Chasm 206 Selling Darkness 222 More Than Meets the Eye 239 Strawberry Yields Forever 254 Play of Brilliants 268

  Epilog: LEDs and Me 286

  Acknowledgments 293

  Sources 295

  Index 313

  I N T R O D U C T I O N T he popular notion, prompted by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, that if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door, is at best a grotesque over-simplification. In fact, the process by which an invention lurches from lab bench to living room is rarely rapid, linear, or smooth. Rather, it proceeds gradually, over decades, in fits and starts, zigzagging hither and thither, slowed down by speed bumps and held up by hazards. Along the way contingency has more than a small part to play. As a journalist writing about new technology, I must confess to having myself long been an enthusiastic subscriber to the reductionist fallacy. The formula for most articles on technological breakthroughs in

  popular media is a simple one. We had this problem, but now we’ve solved it — and here’s how. Everyone loves a happy ending. The real world is much, much more complex.

  For most of my thirtyfive-plus years covering the electronics industry I have marvelled at the magic mushrooming of semiconductor devices, of which the transistor is the best-known. The transistor vanquished its predecessor, the vacuum tube, becoming in the process the sine qua non of our modern world. Without transistors (integrated in the form of microchips), we would have no personal computers or mobile phones; no opticfiber communications or world-wide web. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, were the transistor to go away, pretty much everything we take for granted would grind to a halt.

  Like transistors, light emitting diodes are semiconductor devices. LEDs are tiny, not much bigger than a grain of sand. They use far less electricity than conventional forms of lighting. LEDs can also be controlled with exquisite precision. Today, having already taken over as the backlights on our smartphones and televisions, LEDs are breaking down the last bastion of the vacuum tube, that Victorian-looking contraption made of gas, glass, and brass known as the incandescent light bulb. Tomorrow - as with the transistor - new, previously-unimaginable applications for the LED will emerge. Lighting is leaping directly from the nineteenth century to the twentyfirst. The fusion of digital electronics and “solid-state” lighting will likely continue to improve our lives, in all sorts of unforeseen ways, for many years to come. What has been called the last revolution in lighting - because it is impossible to imagine a technology more efficient than LEDs - is now well and truly underway.

  The visible light emitting diode was invented in 1962. (So much for the world beating a path.) Its inventor, a feisty American engineer named Nick Holonyak, realized right away that his minuscule gizmo had the potential to replace Thomas Edison’s most famous creation. Over the next three decades LEDs became familiar to most people as the red on/off indicators used by electrical appliances. But this was merely light to be seen. Then, in 1993 another inventor, a maverick Japanese engineer named Shuji Nakamura, made the crucial breakthrough that finally opened up the way to the ultimate goal; that is, light to see by. His invention, for which Nakamura won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics, gave LEDs the boost they needed to challenge the incumbent lighting technologies: first incandescent bulbs, then halogen lamps, and finally fluorescent tubes.

  In a previous book, entitled Brilliant!, originally published in 2007, I told the extraordinary story of this development - the bright blue light emitting diode - and early attempts to exploit it. In my introduction to that book I was rash enough to make a prediction about LEDs. Namely that, “by 2020 the tiny lights will likely have superseded all conventional forms of lighting.” In the interim I wrote another book, entitled Switching to Solar. It chronicled the rise and rise of yet another semiconductor device, the photovoltaic cell, out of which solar panels are made. Solar cells do the opposite of LEDs: they transform light into electricity. To my surprise, the core of that book turned out to be not so much technology, but policy; it was activists and legislators rather than engineers and entrepreneurs who made many of the crucial breakthroughs. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to go back and take another look, to squint through this new prism, at what can legitimately be described as the solid-state lighting revolution. That way I would discover whether LEDs were fulfilling my prediction — and find out what else was happening along the way.

  In addition to chronicling progress in the field of solid-state lighting, I also have a more ambitious agenda. That is, to describe how “one of the fastest technology shifts in human history,” as a recent Goldman Sachs report called it, is playing out. And, perhaps more intriguingly, who is driving this transformation. What kind of people does it take to change the light bulb? The answer is passionate, highlymotivated individuals who are frustrated with the status quo who, as a consequence, are determined to make the world a better - and better-lit - place. They are the heroes of this book.

  Lighting matters. Most importantly because lights account for as much as twenty percent of the electricity we consume. Until recently, most of that wattage was wasted, in the form of the heat - infrared light - that incandescent bulbs give off. In 2010, the year I began work on this book, around 11.5 billion incandescent bulbs were sold worldwide, mostly for use in homes. Simply switching to more efficient lamps would save us around 70 percent in our energy use and electricity costs. Less electricity consumed means less carbon pollution generated by existing power stations (and less need to build new ones). In addition to saving consumers money, greater energy efficiency also creates jobs, strengthens the economy, enhances national security, and last but by no means least, reduces environmental impacts.

  Governments working with the lighting industry and electric utilities have already made one attempt to replace the incandescent light bulb with a more energy-efficient alternative, the compact fluorescent lamp. But for a variety of reasons that this book will examine, the substitution was botched. Though latter-day CFLs are actually pretty good, hardly anyone likes them. With penetration never exceeding ten percent of available sockets, they are doomed to end up on the scrapheap of history. Everyone is eager to avoid a similar debacle occurring with LEDs. Bulbs based on light emitting diodes are highly efficient and becoming ever more so. They use less than a quarter as much energy and last at least twenty times as long as their incandescent equivalents. Though the bulbs are still relatively expensive to buy today, LEDs are semiconductors, hence subject to the logic of the learning curve: the more of them you make, the cheaper they get. In fifty years the price of a transistor has plummeted from several thousand dollars for one, to less than a dollar for a billion of them. The price of LEDs is likewise plunging, by around twenty percent annually, even as their brightness continues to increase inexorably toward its physical limit.

  More than price is involved here: what we a
re witnessing is a fullblown paradigm shift. Most of us are aware of the initial goal, that is, to replace the incandescent bulb. But with an LED light bulb lasting for more than twenty years - indeed, their lifetime is so long that an industry joke goes that you should include your LED lights in your will so that your descendants may inherit them - the retrofit market will soon be saturated. In post-Fukushima Japan, thanks to government subsidies, most light sockets in that country are already filled with LEDs. What happens next? How to utilize all that spare production capacity? With manufacturers mulling what else they can do with solid-state lighting, things start to get interesting. As the Nobel prize-winning physicist Herbert Kroemer once said, “a breakthrough technology creates its own applications.”

  Worlds are colliding. The stodgy old lighting industry, where nothing much has happened for a hundred years, which still specifies illumination in “foot-candles,” is slamming head-on into the go-go semiconductor industry, which measures its product cycles in months. Chipmakers typically plough five or six percent of their revenues into R&D. Fixture makers are accustomed to spending only about a tenth as much. The result of this mash-up between slow-moving metal benders and turbo-charged chip heads has been an explosion of innovation, a surge of Schumpeterian creative destruction. Start-ups and spin-offs are popping up all over the place, proposing better ways to do old things, or dreaming up entirely new things to do. Meanwhile, faced with extinction, some of the supposed dinosaurs of the lighting industry are showing unexpected agility in adapting to the new reality.

  LEDs are the most profound change the lighting industry has witnessed since the invention of electric light itself. It is a change that affects us all. Most people think of lighting in terms of bulbs and tubes. Actually, it is not that simple: illumination turns out to be a complex ecosystem. Rather than one large market, lighting splinters into hundreds of niches, worth a combined total of around $100 billion worldwide. In addition to familiar examples like bedside lamps at home and overhead fixtures at work, lighting also includes task lights, street lights, automobile headlights and tail-lights (offering car companies invaluable night-time vehicle-branding opportunities), wall sconces, runway lights, outdoor lighting, emergency signs, and myriad other applications besides.

  This book divides into three parts. The first part concerns evolution, the quest to build better light bulbs and retrofit existing sockets with LEDs. As yet there has been little radical change, merely a decanting of new wine into old bottles. The second part looks beyond bulbs at the replacement of fixtures, other forms of solid-state lighting, and the activities of some of the companies that are leading the way. The third part concerns revolution, the charting of new territory. Though central to civilization, illumination remains primitive. Today we can switch our lights on and off, in some cases also dim them, but that’s about the size of it. Other capabilities exist, but have thus far been sparsely implemented. This is about to change. For one thing, unlike conventional lights, which are bulky, LEDs are tiny. You can put them almost anywhere. They also have a relative, known as organic light emitting diodes, or OLEDs, which provide flat glowing surfaces that extend the range of possible designs even further. What this means is that LEDs will utterly change the way lighting and light fixtures look as they are integrated into new form factors that take advantage of this size differential. For another, LEDs are electronic devices and as such amenable via software to sophisticated digital control, both in the form of individual lights and as networks, such as might be installed throughout a building like a warehouse or an office block. Once a fixture becomes electronic, it costs next to nothing to add sensors to it. So lights come on when people enter a room, go off when they leave, dim themselves in response to the amount of daylight that windows let in, or to the preferences of the people who work there. They can be used to track people moving around inside a supermarket. Control extends not only to the quantity of light but also to the quality, in lights whose wavelengths can be tuned to any color and whose beams can be focused and shaped.

  In the developed world we spend an average of ninety percent of our time indoors. Research has shown that in addition to triggering circadian rhythms - cool blue light wakes us up, warm red light makes us sleepy - light also affects our health and well-being. New scientific discoveries about the human eye and how it processes light are being applied to the development of lighting systems for healthier, more productive environments at school and at work. Also, in hospitals and retirement homes, to hasten recovery and cater to the needs of the ageing eye. Other innovations are in the pipeline. For example, light as an architectural material that can be integrated into the fabric of buildings. Or, light that can be recorded and played back to simulate natural scenarios, like dawn on top of Mount Fuji or sunset on a Maui beach.

  Today - in 2017 - we are at roughly the same stage with regard to lighting as we were in the early eighties with regard to the telephone. At the time of the breakup of the Bell System monopoly in 1984, phones were bulky appliances tethered to the wall. They communicated via analog signals. Back then even the humble cordless was still in the future. Who could have imagined that over the course of thirty years, the clunky phone would morph into a sleek fashion item that slips into your pocket, whose dominant feature is not a rotary dial or a set of buttons, but a full-color, high-resolution touch-screen? In the old days, if you needed to make a call outside the home or the office, you had to use a public phone. Mobiles did not exist. Likewise digital technology. Thirty years ago the idea that you would one day use your phone as a camera would have struck most people as absurd. Still less that a phone would become smart: used as a general-purpose remote controller, sending instructions to all manner of home appliances, or like a credit card, to pay bills, or a flashlight, a pedometer, etcetera, etcetera. But all these things have come to pass and new functions are being added all the time. Does something similar lie in store for lighting? We do not know, but if history is any guide, lighting will become, among other things, digital, personal, wireless, networked, smart, tunable, and capable of far more than mere illumination. What we can say for sure now is that a revolution is underway.

  The light bulb has long been a symbol of innovation, the sudden flash of understanding that denotes the origination of a clever idea. Now that incandescent technology is obsolete, this is an oxymoron. Lights based on LEDs will rectify the mismatch between symbol and reality. Getting to this brave new world will not be straightforward: old technologies die hard. Displacing an incumbent, especially one that has been in place for more than a hundred years, is never easy or painless. Better mousetrap though it undoubtedly is, the LED remains an emerging technology. Before it achieves its destiny - ubiquity - solid-state lighting still has a long way to go. But make no mistake, as I hope this book conclusively demonstrates, it will get there.

  P A R T I: Better Bulbs

  C H A P T E R O N E

  Only One Girl To Dance With T he ability to foresee the future - especially when crucial parts of that future remain to be invented - is rare. It is not innate, it cannot be taught, it can only be learned through experience. Ton Begemann acquired the ability through serving as a science attache at the Dutch embassy in Washington during the 1970s. One of his reports, on American doubts about the prospects for fast-breeder nuclear reactors, caused an uproar back in his native Holland, where utilities were eagerly gearing up to participate in a government-subsidised breeder program. “There were seventeen questions in parliament and headlines in the newspapers,” Begemann said, chuckling as he recalled the furore he had inadvertently caused. “So I decided, Well, this is the end of my career as a diplomat.” On his return to Holland in 1975, he was offered a job with Philips. Begemann wound up working at the company’s lighting subsidiary in Eindhoven, a small city in the southern Netherlands.

  Philips had been founded in Eindhoven back in 1891 to manufacture light bulbs. This was reflected in its original name, Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken, literally “glow-lamp factories.”
The company subsequently parlayed its expertise with glass bulbs into vacuum tubes and thence transistors. This enabled Philips to diversify into other markets, notably consumer electronics, where the firm achieved huge success with its audio cassette recorders and compact disc players. But lighting - bulbs, tubes, and the fixtures that incorporated them - remained its cash cow. During the 1980s Philips was buffeted by competition from Japanese rivals and the imperative to save energy. In 1990, losing money and stung by criticisms that it had become staid and hidebound, the company brought in new management and changed its name to the more modern-sounding Philips Electronics. The incoming team included Einar 1 Kloster, a canny Norwegian, who took over as CEO of the subsidiary, Philips Lighting. One of Kloster’s first actions was to appoint Begemann as his resident soothsayer. Though lighting had not changed much in the past hundred years, complacency was dangerous: it left the business vulnerable to unexpected innovation. “Ton,” Kloster instructed Begemann, “you are going to sit in the office next to me and look at what is going to happen with lighting technologies.”

  Simon Hendrik Anton - “Ton” - Begemann was born in Bandoeng, a city on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies (Bandung in today’s Indonesia) in December 1941, two months before the Japanese invasion. He was a third-generation colonial, his grandfather having left Holland on graduation as a civil engineer for the East Indies, where he pioneered irrigation technology. Begemann’s father, also born in the East Indies, was likewise a civil engineer. He specialized in soil mechanics, inventing a method for drilling soil samples. Captured by the Japanese, he labored as a prisoner of war on the infamous Burma Railway. After the war the family returned to the East Indies, staying on until 1954 when the Dutch were finally ousted by the Indonesians. After graduating from the University of Delft in engineering physics, Begemann went to the US, where he worked for Boeing for two and a half years. Though Begemann loved living in Seattle, he recognized that the prerequisite for advancement in R&D was a postgraduate degree. So he returned to the Netherlands on educational leave of absence to get his PhD. Begemann came back to the US intending to resume his career, but his arrival happened to coincide with massive layoffs as recession ravaged the aircraft maker. He opted to look elsewhere for employment, ending up at the Dutch embassy. Begemann joined Philips aged 34, in an era when almost all the firm’s senior staff had been hired straight out of university. Philips was notorious for its inbred culture, which may help explain why Einar Kloster picked Begemann, an outsider, as his technology trend-spotter.