Actually, LCDs did not come into practical use until relatively recently. After Reinitzer's discovery in 1888, liquid crystals did not attract much attention again until the 1960s. In 1963, RCA researcher Richard Williams discovered that applying voltage to liquid crystals changed how light passed through them, and in 1968, another RCA researcher, George Heilmeier, applied this principle to create a display device. It took until 1978 before an LCD could be commercialized.

The gap between development and commercialization was due to the need for advances in semiconductor electronics before LCDs could become practical. To draw complex images on an LCD, there must be electrodes that can turn on/off on each tiny grid square (called a pixel) on the screen, thereby controlling whether light does or does not pass through. Furthermore, color display requires the addition of color filters on the pixels. LCDs with several tens of thousands of pixels capable of displaying beautiful high-resolution images would have been impossible to make without the application of photolithography, which is used in the manufacture of semiconductor integrated circuits.