Why blue LEDs took decades to invent

A closer look

We conquered splitting the atom long before we could make a tiny blue lightbulb. While red and green variants existed for decades, blue ones required entirely different crystal structures that frustrated scientists until the 1990s. Without blue, you could never mix the colors to get white light, meaning modern flat screens wouldn't exist. Three Japanese scientists finally cracked the formula, winning a Nobel Prize just so your phone screen could blind you at two in the morning.