Transistor
From November 17, 1947, to December 23, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at AT&T's Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey of the United States performed experiments and observed that when two gold point contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, a signal was produced with the output power greater than the input. Solid State Physics Group leader William Shockley saw the potential in this, and over the next few months worked to greatly expand the knowledge of semiconductors. The term "transistor" was coined by John R. Pierce as a contraction of the term "transresistance". According to Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch, authors of a biography of John Bardeen, Shockley had proposed that Bell Labs' first patent for a transistor should be based on the field-effect and that he be named as the inventor. Having unearthed Lilienfeld’s patents that went into obscurity years earlier, lawyers at Bell Labs advised against Shockley's proposal because the idea of a field-effect transistor that used an electric field as a "grid" was not new. Instead, what Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invented in 1947 was the first point-contact transistor. In acknowledgement of this accomplishment, Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".
Reading Works
In 1951, just four years after the invention of the transistor by Bell Laboratories, the Allentown Plant was opened to manufacture the first transistors. Jack Morton was assigned to develop transistors for manufacture. He had been responsible for inventing and providing the military with microwave components during WWII and knew how to get an idea from the lab, into production, and into the field. He established a system of branch labs at several Western Electric plants, consisting of teams of Bell Labs scientists and engineers focused on production engineering and acting as liaison with their colleagues back in Murray Hill. Morton fine-tuned this approach at the new Western Electric plant in Allentown, Pa., which produced electronic devices and components for the Bell System. He set up a Bell Labs semiconductor development group there and put Eugene Anderson in charge.