I recently met an old friend from the time when we both worked in the light-emitting diode (LED) industry. We started discussing how every technology has its day – a window of opportunity – but also how hard it is to know which companies will succeed long-term. As we got talking, I was reminded of a very painful product launch by an LED lighting firm that I was running at the time.

The incident occurred in 2014 when my company had a technology division that was developing wirelessly connected lighting. Our plan was to unveil our new Bluetooth control system at a trade show, but everything that could go wrong for us on the day pretty much did. However, the problems with our product weren’t down to any
particular flaws in our technology.

Instead, they were triggered by issues with a technology from a rival lighting firm that was also exhibiting at the event. We ended up in a rather ugly confrontation with our competitors, who seemed in denial about their difficulties. I realized there was a fundamental problem with their technology – even if they couldn’t see it – and predicted that, for them, the writing was on the wall.

Bother at the booth

Our plan was to put microprocessors and radios into lighting to make it smart, more energy efficient and with integrated sensors and Bluetooth controls. There were no fundamental physics barriers – it just needed some simple thermal management (the LEDs and particularly the radios had to be kept below 70 ºC), some electronics and lots of software.

Back then, the LED lighting industry was following a technology roadmap that envisaged these solid-state devices eventually generating 320 lumens per watt, compared to about 10 lumens per watt from conventional incandescent lamps. As the road map progressed, there’d be ever fewer thermal challenges.

With more and more countries phasing out conventional bulbs, LEDs are continuing their march along the roadmap. Almost every bulb sold these days is an LED and the overall global lighting market was worth $140bn in 2023, according to Fortune Business Insights. Lighting accounts for 15–18% of all electricity consumption in the European Union alone.

Back at that 2014 trade show, called LuxLive, all initially seemed to be going well as we set up our display. There was the odd software bug, but were able to work around that and happily control our LED lights with a smart phone connected via WiFi to a low-cost lighting server (a bit like a Raspberry Pi), with the smart LED fixtures and sensors connected via Bluetooth.

With final preparations over, the trade show opened and our first customer came up to the stand. We started giving them a demo but nothing seemed to be working – to our surprise, we simply could not get our lights to respond. A flurry of behind-the-scenes activity ensured (mostly us switching everything off and on again) but nothing made a difference.

Strangely, my phone call appeared to go dead just as I passed another booth from a rival firm

To try to get to the bottom of things, I stepped a decent distance away from our booth and rang one of our technical team up in London for support. I explained our problem but, strangely, as I walked back towards the booth, I got cut off. My call appeared to have gone dead just as I passed another booth from a rival firm called Ceravision.

It was developing high-efficiency plasma (HEP) lamps that could generate up to 100 lumens per watt – roughly where LEDs were at the time. Its lamps used radio-frequency waves to heat a plasma without needing any electrodes. Designed for sports stadia and warehouses, Ceravision’s bulbs were super bright. In fact, I was almost blinded by its products, which were pointing into the aisle, presumably to attract attention.

Back at base, our technical team frantically tried to figure out why our products weren’t working. But they were stuck and I spent the rest of the day unable to demonstrate our products to potential customers. Then, as if by magic, our system started working again – just as someone noticed we weren’t being blinded by Ceravision’s light any more.

I walked over to Ceravision’s booth as its team was packing up and had a chat with a sales guy, who I asked how the system worked. He told me it was a microwave waveguide light source but didn’t appear to know much more. So I asked him if he wouldn’t mind turning on the light again to demonstrate its output, which he did.

I glanced back at my team, who a few moments earlier had been all smiles that our system was now working, even if they were confused as to why. Suddenly, as the Ceravision light was turned on, our system broke down again. I requested to speak to one of Ceravision’s technical team but was told they wouldn’t be back until the following day.

Lighting the way

I left for the show’s awards dinner, where my firm won an innovation award for the wireless lighting system we’d been trying – unsuccessfully – to demonstrate all day. Later that night, I started looking into Ceravision in more detail. Based in Milton Keynes, UK, its idea of an electrodeless lamp wasn’t new – Nikola Tesla had filed a patent for such a device back in 1894.

Tesla realized that this type of lamp would benefit from a long life and little discolouration as there are no electrodes to degrade or break. In fact, Tesla knew how to get around the bulbs’ technical drawbacks, which involved constraining the radio waves and minimizing their power. Eventually, in the late 1990s, as radio-frequency sources became available,  a US company called Fusion Lighting got this technology to market.

Its lamps consisted of a golf ball-sized fused-quartz bulb containing several milligrams of sulphur powder and argon gas at the end of a thin glass spindle. Enclosed in a microwave-resonant wire-mesh cage, the bulb was bombarded by 2.45 GHz microwaves from a magnetron of the kind you get in a microwave oven. The bulb had a design lifetime of about 60,000 hours and emitted 100 lumens per watt.

Unfortunately, its efficiency was poor as 80–85% of the light generated was trapped inside the opaque ceramic waveguide. Worse still, various satellite companies petitioned the US authorities to force Fusion Lighting to cut its electromagnetic emissions by 99.9%. They feared that otherwise its bulbs would interfere with WiFi, cordless phones and satellite radio services in North America, which also operate at 2.4 GHz.

In 2001 Fusion Lighting agreed to install a perforated metal shield around its lamps to reduce electromagnetic emissions by 95%. However, this decision only reduced the light output, making the bulbs even more inefficient. Ceravision’s solution was an optically clear quartz waveguide and integrated lamp that yielded 100–5000 watts of power without any damage to the lamps.

The company claimed its technology was ideal for growing plants – delivering blue and ultraviolet light missing from other sources – along with everything from sterilizing water to illuminating TV studios. And whereas most magnetrons break down after about 2000 hours, Ceravision’s magnetrons lasted for more than 40,000 hours. It had even signed an agreement with Toshiba to build high-efficient magnetrons.

What could possibly go wrong?

The truth hurts

Back at the trade show, I arrived the following morning determined to get a resolution with the Ceravision technical team. Casually, I asked one of them, who had turned up early, to come over to our booth to see our system. It was working – until the rest of Ceravision arrived and switched their lights on. Once again, our award-winning system gave up the ghost.

Ceravision refused to accept there was a correlation between their lights going on and our system breaking down

Things then got a little ugly. Ceravision staff refused to accept there was a correlation between their lights going on and our system breaking down. Our product must be rubbish, they said. If so, I asked, how come my mobile phone had stopped working too? Silence. I went to talk to the show organizers – all they could do was tell Ceravision to point its lights down, rather than into the aisle.

This actually worked for us as it seemed the “blocking signal” was reasonably directional. It became obvious from Ceravision’s defensive response that this WiFi blocking problem must have come up before – its staff had some over-elaborate and clearly rehearsed responses. As for us, we simply couldn’t show our product in its best light to customers, who just felt it wasn’t ready for market.

In the intervening years, I’ve talked to several ex-employees of Ceravision, who’ve all told me it trialled lots of different systems for different markets. But its products always proved to be too expensive and too complex – and eventually LEDs caught up with them. When I asked them about lights disrupting WiFi, most either didn’t seem aware of the issue or, if they did, knew it couldn’t be fixed without slashing the light output and efficiency of the bulbs.

That in turn forced Ceravision to look for ever more niche applications with ever-tinier markets. Many staff left, realizing the emperor had no clothes. Eventually, market forces took their toll on the company, which put its lighting business into receivership in 2020. Its parent company with all the patents and intellectual property suffered a similar fate in 2023.

I suspect (but don’t know for sure) that the window of opportunity closed due to high system costs, overly complex manufacturing and low volumes, coupled with LEDs becoming cheaper and more efficient. Looking back on 2014, the writing was really on the wall for the technology, even if no-one wanted to read the warning signs. A product that disrupts your mobile or WiFi signal was simply never going to succeed.

It was a classic case of a company having a small window of opportunity before better solutions came along and it missed the proverbial boat. Of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Clearly the staff could see what was wrong, but it took a long time for managers and investors to see or tackle the issues too. Perhaps when you are trying to deliver on promises you end up focusing on the wrong things.

The moral of the story is straightforward: constantly review your customers’ feedback and re-evaluate your products as the market develops. In business, it really is that simple if you want to succeed.

The post James McKenzie: how I knew the writing was on the wall for our rival’s lighting technology appeared first on Physics World.