History of Scrolling LED Signs: 1928 to Your Phone

Long before anyone held up a phone at a concert with a name sliding across it, crowds in Times Square read the news as it travelled around a building in light bulbs. The hardware has changed several times since, from bulbs to red LEDs to full-colour screens, but the idea has barely moved: a short message, bright against dark, sliding past.

This is a fact-checked history of that idea, from the 1928 “zipper” to the free online LED scroller you can open in a browser today. Where sources disagree, we say so. Where something is simply not documented, we say that too.

1928: the news ticker that wrapped a skyscraper

On 6 November 1928, election night, The New York Times switched on a moving electric sign near the base of its tower at One Times Square. Its formal name was the Motograph News Bulletin; New Yorkers called it the zipper. Its first night carried the presidential returns: Herbert Hoover's victory over Al Smith. Sources word that first headline differently, so we won't claim the exact text.

Accounts give about 14,800 incandescent bulbs in a band roughly five feet tall and 368 to 380 feet long (the length varies between sources). It is usually credited to engineers Frank C. Reilly and Francis E. J. Wilde, although historian Dale Cressman, writing in Journalism History in 2018 from the Times company's own records, set out to correct the record on who invented it.

How a bulb sign “scrolled”

Nothing on the building moved. Indoors, an operator set each headline in metal letters and slotted them into frames on a conveyor belt. As the frames passed a field of electrical brushes, each letter completed circuits, and every brush was wired to one bulb outside. The lit pattern marched along the facade at the speed of the belt, and people read it as moving text.

Every LED scroller still uses that trick: a fixed grid of lights, switched in sequence so a pattern appears to glide. Our explainer on how LED dot-matrix displays work covers the modern version.

The zipper's biggest night was 14 August 1945, when it announced Japan's surrender to a crowd estimated at about 750,000. The sign kept running, with long gaps and changes of sponsor, after the Times left the building in the early 1960s.

Other moving displays before the LED

• The stock ticker (1867). The Edison Papers at Rutgers University credit Edward Calahan with the first stock ticker in 1867; Edison followed with his Universal Stock Printer in 1871. As the Library of Congress explains, tickers received prices over telegraph lines and printed them on paper tape, a running strip of short updates.
• Split-flap boards (1950s). Solari of Udine credits Remigio Solari with inventing its split-flap display, first installed in 1956 (the company history shows a Liège “teleindicator” from that year). The Fondazione Pirelli says the boards spread to airports and stations “from Tokyo to London, from Beirut to Sydney.”
• Flip-disc signs. Discs, dark on one side and reflective on the other, are flipped by an electromagnetic current to form letters. The U.S. Access Board notes they were cheap and read well in daylight, but suffered mechanical failures and mostly showed only capitals and numerals.

1962: the first practical visible LED

The light source that would replace the zipper's bulbs came from General Electric's laboratory in Syracuse, New York. On 9 October 1962, Nick Holonyak Jr. demonstrated a gallium arsenide phosphide (GaAsP) diode that glowed visible red, while other researchers were focused on infrared light nobody could see.

Is he “the inventor of the LED”? It depends on the definition. The Nobel Committee notes that light from a semiconductor was reported in 1907 by Henry J. Round and studied by Oleg Losev in the 1920s and 1930s, and it dates the red LED to the end of the 1950s. The University of Illinois, where Holonyak taught from 1963, and the IEEE Photonics Society credit him with the first practical visible-light LED. Fair summary: many people found pieces of the puzzle, and Holonyak made the first practical one you could see. (He was born in 1928, the year the zipper first lit up.)

Red digits and dots: the first LED displays

In February 1969 the Hewlett-Packard Journal introduced the HP 5082-7000 numeric indicator, which showed each digit as “an array of brightly glowing red dots”: 27 GaAsP diodes in a 5 × 7 grid, plus a decimal point. Alphanumeric versions using all 35 positions, controlled by six-bit ASCII, were almost ready for production. That 5 × 7 cell became a common letter grid for later message signs.

The same article made a telling prediction. An LED colour TV would need red, blue and green diodes, the engineers wrote, “and at present we lack the means for producing the blue ones.” They guessed ten more years. Bright blue LEDs arrived about 24 years later.

Meanwhile red digits reached consumers. The HP-35 of 1972, $395, is described by The Henry Ford museum as the world's first handheld scientific calculator and HP's first product to use both integrated circuits and an LED display. Hamilton's Pulsar P-1, released on 4 April 1972 for $2,100, is listed by Guinness World Records as the first electronic digital watch; its LED display used so much power that wearers pressed a button to light it.

Moving-message signs on roads, in shops and offices (1980s–1990s)

By the 1980s the pieces were in place: cheap red LEDs, the 5 × 7 cell and microchips that could shift a message one column at a time. Yet no company or date is recorded as “the first LED scroller”. Scrolling text seems to have appeared in many products at once, and we found no trustworthy source naming a first.

• Lamps first. A sign-industry veteran recalled in Signs of the Times (2006) that in 1978 most electronic message centres were single-line displays lit by 30-watt lamps.
• Roads. The U.S. Access Board reports that highway agencies began testing LED message signs in the mid-to-late 1980s, and that outdoor LEDs were limited to red until the early-to-mid 1990s. Daktronics, founded in 1968 in South Dakota, lists its first roadway display, for the Connecticut DOT, in 1988.
• Shops and offices. Signmaker Pro-Lite said in 2005 that it introduced an indoor red LED sign in 1981 and a three-colour sign in 1984, aimed at retail stores, shopping centres and offices (the company's own account). A 1999 Linux Journal review of its Tru-Color II describes a board costing about $150, in red, yellow and green, that stored 26 pages and scrolled at adjustable speeds.
• Times Square. The zipper went LED in the late 1990s, rebuilt with more than 227,000 amber LEDs.

Notice the colours: red, amber, yellow, green. No blue, so no white and no full colour.

The blue LED and the jump to full colour

Red and green LEDs had been made since the late 1960s, but blue, in the Nobel Committee's words, “remained a challenge for three decades.” The answer was gallium nitride, a material that was notoriously hard to grow.

• Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano at Nagoya University grew high-quality gallium nitride in 1986, solved its p-type layer at the end of the 1980s and presented a bright blue diode in 1992.
• Shuji Nakamura at Nichia, a small company in Tokushima, started in 1988, found his own way to grow the crystal and made a p-type layer in 1992 simply by heating the material.
• In 1993 Nichia released a high-brightness blue LED, about 100 times as efficient as earlier blue LEDs according to Japan's Semiconductor History Museum.

On 7 October 2014 the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physics “for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources.” The citation is about lighting, but signs changed just as much: as the Nobel Committee explains, only red, green and blue together make white, and with all three “millions of different colours can be produced.”

Every pixel could now be any colour. Daktronics' timeline lists its first NFL LED video display in 1998 and its first full LED digital billboard in 2001. The Nobel scientific background adds that gallium-nitride LEDs became the main backlight for LCD screens in phones, laptops and TVs.

The zipper followed. Its amber version was removed in 2019 during a renovation, and in October 2025 SNA Displays announced a 324-foot LED video ticker wrapping the building, with a 12 mm pixel pitch and 100 × 8,220 pixels. The band that once needed 14,800 bulbs is now a full-colour screen.

LED signs you can hold: badges, fan boards and concert culture

Signs also shrank to pocket size. Battery LED name badges, usually 44 × 11 or 48 × 12 LEDs, became a common gadget; the documentation of an open-source upload tool lists up to eight messages, eight scroll speeds, several animation modes and four brightness levels. A zipper for your shirt.

Fans held messages up long before they lit up. At Japanese idol concerts, fans write messages to members on uchiwa hand fans. The Korea Herald traces K-pop cheering from balloons in the 1990s to remote-controlled light sticks and banners. Handheld LED boards that scroll a fan's message are sold too, but we found no reliable record of when they first appeared.

The logic is the 1928 logic: a few words, readable from a distance, moving enough to catch an eye. Planning one? See our concert banner page and these LED banner message ideas.

From pocket gadget to phone screen and browser

A smartphone is already a bright colour pixel grid, so turning it into a scrolling sign only takes software. LED-banner apps are now common on every major phone platform, but as with 1980s signs, we found no well-documented “first” one.

Browsers caught up too. The HTML canvas element, as MDN describes it, lets a page draw and animate graphics with JavaScript, and the Fullscreen API lets a page fill the screen with the browser's bars hidden. That is all a browser-based scroller needs.

Our free online LED scroller draws a real dot-matrix grid on an HTML canvas and lights the dots to form your message, the same principle as the zipper's bulbs. Type text and emojis, choose a solid colour or per-letter multicolour fluorescent colours, set the background colour, font size, bold, LED glow and blink, pick a speed from 1 to 20 and a direction, and add an animated three-colour border. Go fullscreen in landscape, pause or play, and download a PNG or animated GIF. It is free, with no signup and no watermark. A free Android app on Google Play also works offline; there is no iPhone version, but the browser tool needs no install.

The uses have come full circle: a name at arrivals is a one-line headline for one reader (see the airport pickup sign), and a birthday message on a TV is a tiny marquee (see the party marquee).

Timeline at a glance

What changed, and what stayed the same

The hardware changed completely. A bulb sign needed a building, a crew and a conveyor belt; an LED badge needs a small battery; a phone needs a browser tab. Colour went from plain bulbs to red, to amber, to any shade a pixel can mix. And nobody sets metal letters by hand any more: you type.

What makes a scrolling sign work has not changed:

• Short messages. One line at a time: a headline, a name, a few words.
• Contrast. Light against dark, from bulbs on a facade to neon letters on a black screen.
• Motion. Movement catches the eye, and a steady pace lets it keep reading.

The 1928 crowd in Times Square and a fan holding up a phone in an arena are doing the same thing: reading a few bright words as they slide past. The grid just fits in your hand now.