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.
Invention of the integrated circuit
In 1952, Jewell James Ebers from Bell Labs developed a prototype solid-state analog of thyratron – a four-layer transistor, or thyristor. William Shockley simplified its design to a two-terminal "four-layer diode" (Shockley diode) and attempted its industrial production. Shockley hoped that the new device will replace the polarized relay in telephone exchanges; however, the reliability of Shockley diodes was unacceptably low, and his company went into decline.