OLED

OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) technology emerged from Ching Wan Tang and Steven Van Slyke's 1987 work at Eastman Kodak, proving that organic materials could efficiently convert electricity into light. Their discovery would eventually power the screens of billions of smartphones, televisions, and wearables—though it took two decades for the technology to reach mass production.

The adjacent possible traced back to the 1960s, when scientists first observed organic electroluminescence. But early organic EL devices required impractically high voltages and showed poor stability. Making practical devices seemed impossible until Tang and Van Slyke approached the problem differently.

The breakthrough came from applying Tang's organic heterojunction concept—a bilayer structure with separate electron-donating and electron-accepting layers. When charges injected from electrodes met in the middle layer, they combined and released energy as light. This architecture dramatically reduced operating voltage and improved efficiency.

Tang and Van Slyke mined Kodak's chemical library, where thousands of compounds had accumulated since the 1940s. There they found a metal chelate that produced a lasting glow—tris(8-hydroxyquinolinato)aluminium, or Alq3. Their 1987 paper described a device requiring only about 10 volts with luminous efficiency far exceeding previous attempts.

The cascade took time. Pioneer commercialized the first OLED product—a car stereo display—in 1997. Kodak introduced the first consumer device with a full-color OLED screen, the EasyShare LS633 digital camera, in 2003. Sony's XEL-1 in 2007 became the first OLED television. But mass adoption awaited Samsung's aggressive push into AMOLED smartphone displays in the 2010s.

Path dependence favored Korean manufacturers. While Kodak invented the technology, it failed to commercialize it effectively before its core film business collapsed. Samsung and LG invested billions in OLED manufacturing, capturing the market Kodak created but couldn't claim. Tang and Van Slyke were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2018—ironic recognition for an invention whose value was realized by others.

By 2026, OLED dominates premium displays: smartphones, televisions, and increasingly laptops and monitors. The global market exceeds $40 billion annually, projected to surpass $340 billion by 2034. Tang and Van Slyke's organic chemistry became the screen through which billions view the digital world.