5. LED technology in horticulture

5.1 Pre-LED era

Even before Thomas Edison patented the incandescent lamp in 1879, the two French pioneers Magon (1861) and Prilleux (1869) had already thought of using artificial light in horticulture. . In the late 1940s, fluorescent lamps supplanted incandescent lamps in the field of photobiology, not only because of their greater energy efficiency, but also because the blue component of the spectrum could account for up to 10% of total radiation. Then, in the 1970s, the emergence of high-intensity discharge (HID) lamps, such as high-pressure...