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.
Morris Tanenbaum
In the meantime, Gordon Teal had moved to Texas Instruments, where he was essential to the organization of TI's research department. He also led its team of silicon transistor researchers. On April 14, 1954 he and Willis Adcock successfully tested and demonstrated the first grown-junction silicon transistor. Like Tanenbaum, they used highly purified DuPont silicon. Teal was able to bring the silicon transistor to production. He announced the results and displayed the TI transistors on May 10, 1954 at the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) National Conference on Airborne Electronics, in Dayton, Ohio.