Japanese trio Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura are probably still in a festival mood after being awarded the Nobel Prize for their technological breakthrough in blue LEDs, but the man behind the first LED has been left feeling bypassed by the committee, according to a AP report.

Fifty years ago today, 33-year-old GE scientist Dr. Nick Holonyak, Jr., invented the first practical visible-spectrum light-emitting diode (LED), a device that GE colleagues at the time called “the magic one” because its light, unlike infrared lasers, was visible to the human eye. In an interview with GE Lighting conducted in his University of Illinois lab on September 19, 2012—about three weeks ahead of the50th anniversary of his invention of the LED—a now 83-year-old Holonyak recounts the competitive forces that propelled him toward his mom...