There’s almost a magic to the transistor. “I would put it on the level as fire, in terms of its importance to what modern life is like today,” Riordan said. He’s co-author with Lillian Hoddeson of “ Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age,” widely regarded as the definitive history of the transistor. “It has enabled this global civilization,” said Michael Riordan, a physicist and science historian. All three would win the Nobel Prize for these innovations. It’s something in between - a semiconductor.īrattain and Bardeen’s supervisor, William Shockley, was so mad he hadn’t figured it out himself that in a convulsion of creativity just a month later, Shockley thought up an improved, easier-to-manufacture version of the transistor. This transistor was a contrivance that used a shard of rock: germanium, an element that’s not an electrical conductor like copper, nor is it an insulator like rubber. The three won the Nobel Prize in 1956 for their work on the transistor. Their manager, William Shockley, is sitting between them. And by switching the device in and out, a distinct gain in speech level could be heard and seen on the scope presentation with no noticeable change in quality.” Standing, left to right, are Bell Labs physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain in 1948. In this video, Brattain reads from of his original lab notebook, talking about a demonstration they did for senior colleagues. Walter Brattain and John Bardeen of Bell Telephone Laboratories were responsible. Our information and communications world owes a debt to a team of physicists who took theories that had been kicking around for decades, and - after years of false starts and dead ends - got the first transistor to work early in the postwar era. Just about everything electronic is full of them. You’d be hard-pressed to find a gadget or gizmo within reach that does not contain a transistor. We’re exploring the cultures of innovation that brought us the device that changed everything.
The transistor was born in December of 1947, in New Jersey, and it has defined the last half of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st. Odds are, you are surrounded by them right now.
The future began 75 years ago this week with the invention of something small that’s considered the most manufactured item in human history.
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