Before the 90s, if you had a watch you wanted to read in the dark, you were basically out of luck until Timex hit the market with blue-green Indiglo watches.
Today it’s commonplace to look at your phone in the dark and not realize that the brightness is cranked all the way up, totally irritating your retina. But there was a time when portable gadgets like the Game Boy didn’t light up, and you needed another light source to realize your character just died. Indiglo Electroluminescence is one of the innovations that made the world just a little brighter with its faint, underwater-looking blue-green glow.
The technology was popularized by Timex in 1992 and made huge blue-green waves, though it actually dates back decades. According to the Edison Tech Center, it was scientist Georges Destriau, an associate of Marie Curie, who coined the term Electroluminescence in 1936 as he was working on phosphorescent ZnS powders.
