In 1962, the American engineer Nick Holonyak Jr. invented the first visible light-emitting diode (LED) at General Electric's research laboratory in Syracuse, New York. While previous diodes had emitted only invisible infrared radiation, Holonyak's device, made from gallium arsenide phosphide, produced a visible red glow, the first practical LED that could be seen by the human eye. This invention at GE's Syracuse lab launched the LED revolution that would eventually transform lighting, displays, and visual communication worldwide over the following decades.

The LED's production of pure, intense, colored light from a tiny crystal of semiconductor material represented a new kind of artificial illumination very different from both fire and incandescent light. The LED's characteristic colors, starting with red and eventually expanding across the visible spectrum, created a new visual vocabulary that entered the literary and artistic culture of the late twentieth century. The device's miniaturization of light production, reducing the source of illumination to a microscopic point, paralleled the minimalist and concentrated tendencies in late twentieth-century poetry, where the intensity of a single word or image could illuminate an entire poem.