Transistor
From November 17, 1947, to December 23, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at AT&T's Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey of the United States performed experiments and observed that when two gold point contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, a signal was produced with the output power greater than the input. Solid State Physics Group leader William Shockley saw the potential in this, and over the next few months worked to greatly expand the knowledge of semiconductors. The term "transistor" was coined by John R. Pierce as a contraction of the term "transresistance". According to Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch, authors of a biography of John Bardeen, Shockley had proposed that Bell Labs' first patent for a transistor should be based on the field-effect and that he be named as the inventor. Having unearthed Lilienfeld’s patents that went into obscurity years earlier, lawyers at Bell Labs advised against Shockley's proposal because the idea of a field-effect transistor that used an electric field as a "grid" was not new. Instead, what Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invented in 1947 was the first point-contact transistor. In acknowledgement of this accomplishment, Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".
History of science and technology in Japan
The parametron was a logic circuit element invented by Eiichi Goto in 1954. It was a digital computer element. Parametrons were used in Japanese computers from 1954 to the early 1960s, such as the University of Tokyo's PC-1 built in 1958, due to being reliable and inexpensive, but were ultimately surpassed by transistors due to differences in speed.The ETL Mark I, Japan's first digital automatic computer, began development in 1951 and was completed in 1952. It was developed by the Electrotechnical Laboratory using relays, based on the switching circuit theory formulated by Akira Nakashima in the 1930s and advanced by Goto Mochinori in the 1940s.The ETL Mark III began development in 1954, and was completed in 1956, created by Japan's Electrotechnical Laboratory. It was the first stored-program transistor computer. It used ultrasonic delay line memory.