Ultra-small and ultra-bright, the LED has revolutionised electric light, emitting bright beams using an incredibly low amount of energy.
At the Economist Innovation Summit in London, in November 2011, the inventor of the light-emitting diode said the tiny, energy efficient lights will soon be everywhere.
This year, Nick Holonyak's LED which he came up with back in the 1960s, has been incorporated into a lightbulb that could last twenty. If you hate shopping for the mundane, that's an incredible advancement.
According to Wikipedia, Holonyak was making big claims for his tiny lights as far back as 1963, a year after it came into being.
Holonyak told the February 1963 issue of Reader's Digest that LEDs would eventually replace the incandescent light bulb.
With lower running costs, a longer life and lower emissions, the LED invasion is good news all round. Low-emission LEDs that were build in the 1970s and 1980s are still functioning, an are now found almost everywhere from billboards to car signal lights and the scrolling NASDAQ stock market displays.
James Dyson's son, Jake, has taken the LED into the laboratory, the study and the doctor's office, with a new way of working the ultra-bright diodes into task lighting.
The LED is not just great for the environment, in Dyson's hands, they look stylish to boot.