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.
Transistor laser
The team credited with discovering the transistor laser was headed by Milton Feng and Nick Holonyak, Jr., and was based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Research into the transistor laser came about after Feng and Holonyak created the first light-emitting transistor in 2004. Feng and his team then modified the light-emitting transistor to focus the light it output into a laser beam. Their research was funded by DARPA. The paper written about the discovery of the transistor laser was ranked as a top five paper out of all of "Applied Physics Letters"’ history, and the transistor laser was called one of the top 100 discoveries by "Discover".