Changing the Light Bulb: Fast Growth in Once-Staid Industry: By EVAN RAMSTAD and KATHRYN KRANHOLD

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Coke’s ad in Times Square.
June 8, 2006
Changing the Light Bulb
Changing the Light Bulb
Fast Growth in Once-Staid Industry
By EVAN RAMSTAD and KATHRYN KRANHOLD
June 8, 2006; Page B1
The future of lighting is in chips.
Light-emitting diodes — those tiny, chip-based lights that for years have
served as the power indicator on stereos and coffee-makers — are
shaking up the global lighting industry like nothing since fluorescent bulbs emerged just after World War
II.
The spread of LEDs into a wider array of products poses new challenges for Philips Electronics NV,
of Amsterdam; Siemens AG’s Osram unit, based in Munich, Germany; and General Electric Co., of
Fairfield, Conn. The three have dominated every step of making a light bulb, from tungsten mining to retail
promotions, for more than a century. But the LED arena is wide open, with the big multinationals going
up against start-up manufacturers in core chip technology and against niche producers of finished
products — far more competition than they faced in traditional lighting.
A traditional light bulb uses an electrified wire filament in a vacuum tube. An
LED, on the other hand, is a semiconductor chip that, when zapped with
electricity, emits light. The color of the light depends on the material at the
base of the chip. Like computer chips, LEDs can be very small — several
could fit on fingernail — and they can be programmed by software to light
up, for example, a stadium scoreboard.
Such flexibility first pushed LEDs into applications where traditional bulbs
wouldn’t work. Now, high-power LEDs are taking the place of bulbs,
showing up in cellphones, cars, televisions and elsewhere in homes, the light
bulb’s stronghold.
LEDs consume less electricity than many other types of lights and last longer
than most — around 10 years or so. Like other types of chips, their cost is
falling and performance is improving as manufacturers make advances in
materials and factory processes. “It’s going to open up and revolutionize the
way we use and think about lighting,” says Robert Steele, an analyst with Strategies Unlimited, a U.S.
market-research firm that specializes in LEDs.
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Miami Dolphins’ end-zone screen
Cellphones are the biggest new LED market, lighting up keypads and liquid crystal displays. (Computer
screens, in contrast, rely on fluorescent bulbs for light.) Sales of high-brightness LEDs, the kind used in
the new products, are estimated to be $4 billion to $5 billion this year. Sales are expected to hit $10
billion by the end of the decade.
Among the new applications fueling LED growth: Drivers of the new Ford Motor Co. Mustang can use
the “MyColor” feature to change the color of the lighting on their LED-laden dashboard. (A small line of
red, green and blue LEDs can, in varying combinations, produce 125 colors.) Boeing Corp. plans to use
LEDs throughout the interior of its new 787 Dreamliner commercial jet, creating lighting environments that
are supposed to help international travelers adjust to time-zone changes. Owners of a Louisville, Ky.,
restaurant, Proof On Main, eliminated dangling light bulbs and replaced them with LED lighting that
changes from amber in the morning to violet late at night. Already, some traffic signals in cities in the U.S.
and China use LED fixtures that switch between red, yellow and green, instead of separate colored
bulbs.
Philips is selling flameless candles, with LEDs providing the
“flickering” light source. It also is experimenting with LED-based lights
in the shape of bulbs that fit into existing lamps and offer a twist:
Squeezing or tapping the bulb turns it on or off, or makes it change
color. (LEDs don’t get hot because they use so little energy.) And
Philips is developing a remote-controlled LED room-lighting system.
LEDs’ rising influence is most visible in the growth of companies
working on the basic technology. Philips Electronics’ Lumileds, Nichia
Chemical Corp. and Toyoda Gosei Co., of Japan, and Cree Inc., of Durham, N.C., produce LED chips
and sell them to firms that build finished lights. In Asia, some packages for LED flashlights made by
Energizer Holdings Inc. are marked “LED by Nichia” — a marketing ploy similar to the “Intel Inside”
sticker on a computer.
Some start-ups are establishing early leads in market niches. Canada’s Carmanah Technologies Corp.
married LEDs with solar panels for marine buoys. It later expanded into aviation, selling easy-installation
runway lights to the U.S. military in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The technology has driven Daktronics Inc. of Brookings, S.D., the largest U.S. maker of scoreboards,
into other types of outdoor signs, including some in New York’s Times Square and London’s Piccadilly
Circus. And LEDs have replaced incandescent light bulbs on many high school scoreboards. “It’s a much
more cost-effective and much better energy source,” says Chief Executive Jim Morgan.
Daktronics has edged ahead of an Asian rival, Lighthouse Technologies, of Hong Kong, in a race to
make the biggest LED screen. Two months ago, Daktronics unveiled a 50-foot-high by 140-foot-wide
screen for Dolphin Stadium in Miami, beating Lighthouse’s 132-foot screen, which sits above touristy
Nathan Road in Hong Kong.
A GE engineer, Nick Holonyak Jr., built the first LED in 1962, and the company patented the discovery.
Among the first big uses for LEDs were calculators, and manufacturer Hewlett-Packard Co. eventually
bought GE’s patent.
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Philips Electronics’ LED light ‘bulbs’ change color when squeezed.
But the technology remained on the
fringes of industry for decades.
Nichia and Cree changed that in the
1990s by broadening the LED color
palette, which previously had been
limited to red, yellow and green. The
breakthrough came in 1993, when Nichia, Toyoda Gosei (part-owned by Toyota Motor Co.) and,
soon afterward, Cree conquered blue, marking the final step to creating combinations that would fill out
the color spectrum, including white.
Major manufacturers took notice. In 1999, GE formed GELcore, a venture with chip maker Emcore
Corp., to get back into the LED business. The joint venture is looking to develop the perfect-white
lighting system, which could be used as general illumination in retail stores, industrial buildings and, some
day, homes.
“The game for us is white,” says Michael Petras, vice president of GE’s commercial- and
industrial-lighting sales. “It’s the lighting market.”
Nichia remains the biggest force in overall production of LED chips. Leading in the production of
high-powered chips are Osram Opto Semiconductors and Lumileds, a former joint venture of Philips
Electronics and the Hewlett-Packard spinoff Agilent Technologies Inc. and now 100% owned by
Philips. Gerard Kleisterlee, Philips’s CEO, says one need only look at the history of other electronics
markets to know how varied the future may get.
“We were founded around the manufacture of incandescent light, and that vacuum tube produced other
vacuum tubes for radios and picture tubes for TVs,” Mr. Kleisterlee says. Radio tubes gave way to
transistors, and TV tubes to liquid-crystal displays. “Now,” he says, “finally that same thing starts to
happen to lighting.”
Write to Evan Ramstad at evan.ramstad@wsj.com1 and Kathryn Kranhold at
kathryn.kranhold@wsj.com2
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A Narrative History of the Light Bulb: S T E P H E N WI R T Z G A L L E R Y

S T E P H E N WI R T Z G A L L E R Y
STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, INC. 49 GEARY STREET SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 94108
TELEPHONE (415) 433-6879 FAX (415) 433-1608 EMAIL SWG@WIRTZGALLERY.COM
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Julie Casemore, (415) 433-6879, julie@wirtzgallery.com
CATHERINE WAGNER
A Narrative History of the Light Bulb
Exhibition dates: March 28 – April 28, 2007
Opening reception for the artist, Thursday, April 5, 2007, 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Stephen Wirtz Gallery presents A Narrative History of the Light Bulb, a new series of photographs by Catherine Wagner.
While in residence at the Baltimore Museum of Industry during the last two years, Catherine Wagner was given access to
their 50,000+ collection of historic light bulbs, one of the premier collections of vintage and antique light bulbs in the United
States, with lights dating from the early 19th century. The resulting series of photographs titled A Narrative History of the
Light Bulb embodies both sculptural installation and photography. Wagner creates arrangements of bulbs that she then
photographs with an 8 by 10 view camera in order to record the glass enclosures and the delicate filaments in stunning detail.
Wagner’s work has long been noted for its investigation of the dissemination of knowledge and the construction of culture
and these new works follow in her trajectory of providing access to the close scrutiny of scientific objects.
These works are records of historical light bulb classification as well as narrative landscapes of metaphor rich objects that
borrow from the history of the still life. With a keen eye toward Morandi, Wagner utilizes similar strategies of grouping
familiar objects in beautiful, compelling installations. Some are based on scientific indexes, such as Early Tungsten or
Carbon Filaments 1900- 1910; others are constructed more lyrically, with sensitivity to the implied stories in the groupings
of bulbs. Wagner employs an intuitive approach, cataloging them by color, form, or aesthetic with examples that include an
installation of varying blue bulbs entitled, Homage to Yves Klein, and the architecturally based collection entitled Utopia,
which invokes ideal cityscapes. Green Energy involves a double entendre: the topical need for our technology to become
more sustainable, and also a metaphor our landscape.
Wagner focus on the invention and history of the light bulb and its place as a cultural indicator follows from her long-term
interest in the phenomenon of light as evidenced by past projects such as Cross Sections, Pomegranate Wall (San Jose
Museum of Art, 2001,) the installation of Home and Other Stories (a constructed light and photographic installation at
LACMA, 1993,) as well as her over thirty year career in photography, a medium inherently dependant on light.
Wagner was named one of Time magazine’s Fine Arts Innovators of the Year for 2001. Her work is represented in numerous
public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; among others. Monographs include
Cross Sections (2002), Art & Science: Investigating Matter (1996), Home and Other Stories (1993), and American
Classroom (1988).
Stephen Wirtz Gallery is located at 49 Geary St., 3rd Fl., San Francisco, CA 94108, (415) 433-6879, Gallery hours are
Tuesday-Friday, 9:30-5:30, Saturday 10:30-5:30.