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.
Morgan Sparks
Morgan Sparks (July 6, 1916 – May 3, 2008) was an American scientist and engineer who helped develop the microwatt bipolar junction transistor in 1951, which was a critical step in making transistors usable for every-day electronics. Sparks directed Sandia National Laboratories.