Shuji Nakamura

Shuji Nakamura was born in 1954 in a fishing village on Shikoku and studied electronic engineering at the local University of Tokushima. In 1979 he joined Nichia, a small company in the same town that made phosphors for television screens. He spent ten years developing products that did not sell and was told by colleagues that he ought to resign.

Red and green LEDs existed, but the blue one that would make white light possible had defeated the largest electronics companies in the world. Nakamura went to the elderly founder of Nichia in 1988 and asked for three million dollars and a year at the University of Florida to learn crystal growing. Astonishingly, he got it. He chose gallium nitride, a material most researchers considered a dead end, partly because so few people were working on it that he would not be scooped.

Back in Tokushima he rebuilt his growth reactor with his own hands, modifying it in the mornings and running experiments in the afternoons. When the founder handed the company to his son-in-law, Nakamura was ordered to stop. He ignored the order. In 1993 he produced a blue LED a thousand times brighter than anything before it, and Nichia\'s sales quadrupled.

He was paid a bonus of 20,000 yen, about 180 dollars. He left for the University of California in 1999, sued Nichia in 2001, and was awarded 20 billion yen by a Tokyo court before settling for far less. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014.