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".
Nobel Prize controversies
The 1956 prize went to John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain and William Bradford Shockley "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect". However, the committee did not recognize numerous preceding patent applications. As early as 1928, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented several modern transistor types. In 1934, Oskar Heil patented a field-effect transistor. It is unclear whether Lilienfeld or Heil had built such devices, but they did cause later workers significant patent problems. Further, Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker, at Westinghouse Paris, applied for a patent in 1948 of an amplifier based on the minority carrier injection process. Mataré had first observed transconductance effects during the manufacture of germanium diodes for German radar equipment during World War II. Shockley was part of other controversies—including his position as a corporate director and his self-promotion efforts. Further, the original design Shockley presented to Brattain and Bardeen did not work. His share of the prize resulted from his development of the superior junction transistor, which became the basis of the electronics revolution. He excluded Brattain and Bardeen from the proceeds of this process, even though the idea may have been theirs. Another controversy associated with Shockley was his support of eugenics. He regarded his published works on this topic as the most important work of his career.