Transistor
The transistor is the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices, and is ubiquitous in modern electronic systems. Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented a field-effect transistor in 1926 but it was not possible to actually construct a working device at that time. The first practically implemented device was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. The transistor revolutionized the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers, among other things. The transistor is on the list of IEEE milestones in electronics, and Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement.
Norm Winningstad
He graduated in 1948 as an expert in vacuum tubes, which was the same year Bell Labs developed the transistor. As the transistor would replace vacuum tubes in most applications, Winningstad later joked that he "graduated technically obsolete". He then worked at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in his hometown for a few years. He was married to Dolores, and they had two sons, Richard and Dennis, along with a daughter Joanne.