Who developed the transistor?
History of hearing aids
The development of transistors in 1948 by Bell Laboratories led to major improvements to the hearing aid. The transistor was invented by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. Transistors were created to replace vacuum tubes; they were small, required less battery power and had less distortion and heat than their predecessor. These vacuum tubes were typically hot and fragile, so the transistor was the ideal replacement.The 1952 Sonotone 1010 used a transistor stage along with vacuum tubes, to extend battery life. The size of these transistors led to developments in miniature, carbon microphones. These microphones could be mounted on various items, even eyeglasses. In 1951, Raytheon manufactured the transistor and was one of the first companies to mass-produce transistors to throughout America. Raytheon realized that their hearing aid only lasted short-term and began to sell the vacuum-tube hearing aids again along with transistor hearing aids.
Dmitri Z. Garbuzov
The 1970 demonstration of the first room-temperature diode laser crowned years of scientific and technological research developments involving optical semiconductors. These accomplishments parallel, but lag, the microelectronics revolution that started with the transistor, first demonstrated in 1947 (leading to the displacement of vacuum tube electronics in the marketplace). Although the laser had already been invented by Charles Hard Townes and Arthur Leonard Schawlow, separately by Gordon Gould, and separately in the Soviet Union by Aleksandr Prokhorov, there was no practical laser "chip" which would make the laser a commodity, one that today is displacing more inefficient lasers (those based on gas discharge or flashlamp designs) in the consumer, industrial, medical, and government marketplaces.
History of the transistor
The static induction transistor, the first high frequency transistor concept, was invented by Japanese engineers Jun-ichi Nishizawa and Y. Watanabe in 1950, and was finally able to produce some experimental prototypes in 1975. It was the fastest transistor through to the 1980s.
William Shockley
William Bradford Shockley Jr. (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was an American physicist and inventor. Shockley was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for "their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect."
Computer
The bipolar transistor was invented in 1947. From 1955 onwards transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer designs, giving rise to the "second generation" of computers.
Compared to vacuum tubes, transistors have many advantages: they are smaller, and require less power than vacuum tubes, so give off less heat. Silicon junction transistors were much more reliable than vacuum tubes and had longer, indefinite, service life. Transistorized computers could contain tens of thousands of binary logic circuits in a relatively compact space.
History of computing hardware
The bipolar transistor was invented in 1947. From 1955 onward transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer designs, giving rise to the "second generation" of computers. Initially the only devices available were germanium point-contact transistors. Compared to vacuum tubes, transistors have many advantages: they are smaller, and require less power than vacuum tubes, so give off less heat. Silicon junction transistors were much more reliable than vacuum tubes and had longer, indefinite, service life. Transistorized computers could contain tens of thousands of binary logic circuits in a relatively compact space. Transistors greatly reduced computers' size, initial cost, and operating cost.
Typically, second-generation computers were composed of large numbers of printed circuit boards such as the IBM Standard Modular System
each carrying one to four logic gates or flip-flops.
History of the transistor
At the same time some European scientists were led by the idea of solid-state amplifiers. In August 1948 German physicists Herbert F. Mataré (1912–2011) and Heinrich Welker (1912–1981), working at Compagnie des Freins et Signaux Westinghouse in Aulnay-sous-Bois, France applied for a patent on an amplifier based on the minority carrier injection process which they called the "transistron". Since Bell Labs did not make a public announcement of the transistor until June 1948, the transistron was considered to be independently developed. Mataré had first observed transconductance effects during the manufacture of silicon diodes for German radar equipment during WWII. Transistrons were commercially manufactured for the French telephone company and military, and in 1953 a solid-state radio receiver with four transistrons was demonstrated at the Düsseldorf Radio Fair.
William Shockley
Shockley, angered by not being included on the patent applications, secretly continued his own work to build a different sort of transistor based on junctions instead of point contacts; he expected this kind of design would be more likely to be commercially viable. The point contact transistor, he believed, would prove to be fragile and difficult to manufacture. Shockley was also dissatisfied with certain parts of the explanation for how the point contact transistor worked and conceived of the possibility of minority carrier injection. On February 13, 1948 another team member, John N. Shive, built a point contact transistor with bronze contacts on the front and back of thin wedge of germanium, proving that holes could diffuse through bulk germanium and not just along the surface as previously thought. Shive's invention sparked Shockley's invention of the junction transistor. A few months later he invented an entirely new, considerably more robust, type of transistor with a layer or 'sandwich' structure. This structure went on to be used for the vast majority of all transistors into the 1960s, and evolved into the bipolar junction transistor. Shockley later admitted that the workings of the team were "mixture of cooperation and competition." He also admitted that he kept some of his own work secret until his "hand was forced" by Shive's 1948 advance. Shockley worked out a rather complete description of what he called the "sandwich" transistor, and a first proof of principle was obtained on April 7, 1949.
Oskar Heil
Heil is mentioned as the inventor of an early transistor-like device (see also History of the transistor), based on several patents that were issued to him.
Transistor
The transistor is the key active component in practically all modern electronics. Many consider it to be one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. Its importance in today's society rests on its ability to be mass-produced using a highly automated process (semiconductor device fabrication) that achieves astonishingly low per-transistor costs. The invention of the first transistor at Bell Labs was named an IEEE Milestone in 2009.
William Gardner Pfann
Pfann was involved in William Shockley's efforts with Bell Labs to use semiconductors to make devices to replace vacuum tubes. The early efforts used germanium. They made high back-voltage germanium rectifiers in 1945. Pfann devised one of the first point-contact transistors: "Specifically, W.G. Pfann had modified the Western Electric 1N26 shielded point-contact (silicon) diode to include two spring-loaded cat whisker point contacts, making a three-electrode configuration with good electrical amplifying properties. This configuration became known at the Type A transistor." He and Walter Brattain developed the process of "forming" these transistors to make them more uniform. 
Pfann also invented a method of bonding fine gold wires to germanium that made the device functional. "The quiet, unassuming man grew steadily in everyone's esteem as he made one valuable contribution after another to the semiconductor research effort."
John N. Shive
John Northrup Shive (February 22, 1913 – June 1, 1984) was an American physicist and inventor. He made notable contributions in electronic engineering and solid-state physics during the early days of transistor development at Bell Laboratories. In particular, he produced experimental evidence that holes could diffuse through bulk germanium, and not just along the surface as previously thought. This paved the way from Bardeen and Brattain's point-contact transistor to Shockley's more-robust junction transistor. Shive is best known for inventing the phototransistor in 1948 (a device that combines the sensitivity to light of a photodiode and the current gain of a transistor), and for the Shive wave machine in 1959 (an educational apparatus used to illustrate wave motion).
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.
Ian Munro Ross
In 1952 William Shockley hired him to work in semiconductors at Bell Labs, and he arrived in Murray Hill just after John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain had left. Shockley's group focused exclusively on transistor improvements, and Ross and G. C. Dacey were instrumental in the early stages of development of the field-effect transistor. In 1960 Ross and others invented epitaxy. He subsequently rose through managerial ranks, ultimately serving as the sixth President of Bell Labs 1979–1991 and overseeing its reorganization following the breakup of the Bell System.
Semiconductor device
The static induction transistor, the first high frequency transistor, was invented by Japanese engineers Jun-ichi Nishizawa and Y. Watanabe in 1950. It was the fastest transistor through to the 1980s.
History of the transistor
Twelve people are mentioned as directly involved in the invention of the transistor in the Bell Laboratory.
History of the transistor
The first patent for the field-effect transistor principle was filed in Canada by Austrian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld on October 22, 1925, but Lilienfeld published no research articles about his devices, and his work was ignored by industry. In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another field-effect transistor. There is no direct evidence that these devices were built, but later work in the 1990s show that one of Lilienfeld's designs worked as described and gave substantial gain. Legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that William Shockley and a co-worker at Bell Labs, Gerald Pearson, had built operational versions from Lilienfeld's patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles.
The Bell Labs work on the transistor emerged from war-time efforts to produce extremely pure germanium "crystal" mixer diodes, used in radar units as a frequency mixer element in microwave radar receivers. A parallel project on germanium diodes at Purdue University succeeded in producing the good-quality germanium semiconducting crystals that were used at Bell Labs. Early tube-based circuits did not switch fast enough for this role, leading the Bell team to use solid state diodes instead.
Electric organ
Electronic organs before the mid-1950s had used vacuum tubes which tended to be bulky and unstable. This restricted attempts to extend features and spread their use into homes. Transistors, invented at Bell Labs in 1947, went into practical production in the 1950s, and their small size and stability led to major changes in the production of electronics equipment, in what has been termed the "transistor revolution".
Milton Feng
Reported in the January 5 issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters in 2004, Milton Feng and Nick Holonyak, the inventor of the first practical light-emitting diode (LED) and the first semiconductor laser to operate in the visible spectrum, made the world's first light-emitting transistor. This hybrid device, fabricated by Feng's graduate student Walid Hafez, had one electrical input and two outputs (electrical output and optical output) and operated at a frequency of 1 MHz. The device was made of indium gallium phosphide, indium gallium arsenide, and gallium arsenide, and emitted infrared photons from the base layer.
Nick Holonyak
Holonyak earned his bachelor's (1950), master's (1951), and doctoral (1954) degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Holonyak was John Bardeen's first Ph.D. student there; Bardeen, a theoretical physicist, was the co-inventor of the transistor who ultimately won Nobel Prizes for that work and for the theory of superconductivity. In 1954 he went to Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked on silicon-based electronic devices. From 1955–1957 Holonyak served with the U.S. Army Signal Corps. From 1957–1963 he was a scientist at the General Electric Company's Advanced Semiconductor Laboratory in Syracuse, New York. In 1963, he became a professor at the University of Illinois, from which he retired fifty years later in 2013.
History of the transistor
Brattain and H. R. Moore made a demonstration to several of their colleagues and managers at Bell Labs on the afternoon of 23 December 1947, often given as the birth date of the transistor. The "PNP point-contact germanium transistor" operated as a speech amplifier with a power gain of 18 in that trial. In 1956 John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain, and William Bradford Shockley were honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".
Transformer
Faraday performed early experiments on induction between coils of wire, including winding a pair of coils around an iron ring, thus creating the first toroidal closed-core transformer. However he only applied individual pulses of current to his transformer, and never discovered the relation between the turns ratio and EMF in the windings.
The first type of transformer to see wide use was the induction coil, invented by Rev. Nicholas Callan of Maynooth College, Ireland in 1836. He was one of the first researchers to realize the more turns the secondary winding has in relation to the primary winding, the larger the induced secondary EMF will be. Induction coils evolved from scientists' and inventors' efforts to get higher voltages from batteries. Since batteries produce direct current (DC) rather than AC, induction coils relied upon vibrating electrical contacts that regularly interrupted the current in the primary to create the flux changes necessary for induction. Between the 1830s and the 1870s, efforts to build better induction coils, mostly by trial and error, slowly revealed the basic principles of transformers.
History of the transistor
An early witness of the phenomenon was Ralph Bray, a young graduate student. He joined the germanium effort at Purdue University in November 1943 and was given the tricky task of measuring the spreading resistance at the metal-semiconductor contact. Bray found a great many anomalies, such as internal high-resistivity barriers in some samples of germanium. The most curious phenomenon was the exceptionally low resistance observed when voltage pulses were applied. This effect remained a mystery because nobody realised, until 1948, that Bray had observed minority carrier injection - the effect that was identified by William Shockley at Bell Labs and made the transistor a reality.
History of the transistor
The Bell team made many attempts to build such a system with various tools, but generally failed. Setups where the contacts were close enough were invariably as fragile as the original cat's whisker detectors had been, and would work briefly, if at all. Eventually they had a practical breakthrough. A piece of gold foil was glued to the edge of a triangular plastic wedge, and then the foil was sliced with a razor at the tip of the triangle. The result was two very closely spaced contacts of gold. When the plastic was pushed down onto the surface of a crystal and voltage applied to the other side (on the base of the crystal), current started to flow from one contact to the other as the base voltage pushed the electrons away from the base towards the other side near the contacts. The point-contact transistor had been invented.
History of electrical engineering
The invention of the transistor in 1947 by William B. Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain opened the door for more compact devices and led to the development of the integrated circuit in 1958 by Jack Kilby and independently in 1959 by Robert Noyce. In the mid to late 1950s, the term radio engineering gradually gave way to the name electronics engineering, which then became a stand-alone university degree subject, usually taught alongside electrical engineering with which it had become associated due to some similarities. In 1968 Marcian Hoff invented the first microprocessor at Intel and thus ignited the development of the personal computer. The first realization of the microprocessor was the Intel 4004, a 4-bit processor developed in 1971, but only in 1973 did the Intel 8080, an 8-bit processor, make the building of the first personal computer, the Altair 8800, possible.
Point-contact transistor
The point-contact transistor was the first type of transistor to be successfully demonstrated. It was developed by research scientists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Laboratories in December 1947. They worked in a group led by physicist William Shockley. The group had been working together on experiments and theories of electric field effects in solid state materials, with the aim of replacing vacuum tubes with a smaller device that consumed less power.
Light-emitting transistor
Reported in the January 5, 2004 issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters, Milton Feng and Nick Holonyak, the inventor of the first practical light-emitting diode (LED) and the first semiconductor laser to operate in the visible spectrum, made the world's first light-emitting transistor. This hybrid device, fabricated by Feng's graduate student Walid Hafez, had one electrical input and two outputs (electrical output and optical output) and operated at a frequency of 1 MHz. The device was made of indium gallium phosphide, indium gallium arsenide, and gallium arsenide, and emitted infrared photons from the base layer.
Diffusion transistor
The planar transistor was developed by Dr. Jean Hoerni at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959. The planar process used to make these transistors made mass-produced monolithic integrated circuits possible.
Heinrich Welker
Heinrich Johann Welker (September 9, 1912 in Ingolstadt – December 25, 1981 in Erlangen) was a German theoretical and applied physicist who invented the "transistron", a transistor made at Westinghouse independently of the first successful transistor made at Bell Laboratories. He did fundamental work in III-V compound semiconductors, and paved the way for microwave semiconductor elements and laser diodes.
Naoki Yokoyama
Dr. (March 28, 1949 - ) is a Japanese electrical engineer, active in the fields of nanotechnology and electronic and photonic devices, best known for his success in fabricating hot-electron transistors and invention of resonant-tunneling transistors.
Nanoelectronics
In 1999, the CMOS transistor developed at the Laboratory for Electronics and Information Technology in Grenoble, France, tested the limits of the principles of the MOSFET transistor with a diameter of 18 nm (approximately 70 atoms placed side by side). This was almost one tenth the size of the smallest industrial transistor in 2003 (130 nm in 2003, 90 nm in 2004, 65 nm in 2005 and 45 nm in 2007). It enabled the theoretical integration of seven billion junctions on a €1 coin. However, the CMOS transistor, which was created in 1999, was not a simple research experiment to study how CMOS technology functions, but rather a demonstration of how this technology functions now that we ourselves are getting ever closer to working on a molecular scale. Today it would be impossible to master the coordinated assembly of a large number of these transistors on a circuit and it would also be impossible to create this on an industrial level.
Photodiode
A phototransistor is a light-sensitive transistor. A common type of phototransistor, called a photobipolar transistor, is in essence a bipolar transistor encased in a transparent case so that light can reach the "base–collector junction". It was invented by Dr. John N. Shive (more famous for his wave machine) at Bell Labs in 1948, but it was not announced until 1950. The electrons that are generated by photons in the base–collector junction are injected into the base, and this photodiode current is amplified by the transistor's current gain β (or h). If the base and collector leads are used and the emitter is left unconnected, the phototransistor becomes a photodiode. While phototransistors have a higher responsivity for light they are not able to detect low levels of light any better than photodiodes. Phototransistors also have significantly longer response times. Field-effect phototransistors, also known as photoFETs, are light-sensitive field-effect transistors. Unlike photobipolar transistors, photoFETs control drain-source current by creating a gate voltage.
Morgan Sparks
Sparks went on to work at Bell Labs where John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley were developing the first transistor. Sparks stayed at Bell Labs and worked there to develop the microwatt bipolar junction transistor which helped make transistors practical enough for common use. Later, Sparks left Bell Labs to become the director of Sandia National Laboratories.
Oleg Losev
Although he was never able to complete a formal education and never held a research position, Losev conducted some of the earliest research into semiconductors, publishing 43 papers and receiving 16 "author's certificates" (the Soviet version of patents) for his discoveries. He observed light emission from carborundum point-contact junctions, the first light-emitting diode (LED), did the first research on them, proposed the first correct theory of how they worked, and used them in practical applications such as electroluminescence. He explored negative resistance in semiconductor junctions, and was first to use them practically for amplification, building the first solid-state amplifiers, electronic oscillators, and superheterodyne radio receivers, 25 years before the invention of the transistor. However his achievements were overlooked, and languished unknown for half a century before being recognized in the late 20th and early 21st century.
Carver Mead
Stimulated by Moore's question, Mead and his students began a physics-based analysis of possible materials, trying to determine a lower bound for Moore's Law. In 1968, Mead demonstrated, contrary to common assumptions, that as transistors decreased in size, they would not become more fragile or hotter or more expensive or slower. Rather, he argued that transistors would get faster, better, cooler and cheaper as they were miniaturized. His results were initially met with considerable skepticism, but as designers experimented, more and more results supported his assertion. In 1972, Mead and graduate student Bruce Hoeneisen predicted that transistors could be made as small as 0.15 microns. This lower limit to transistor size was considerably smaller than had been generally expected. Despite initial doubts, Mead's prediction influenced the computer industry's development of submicron technology. When Mead's predicted target was achieved in actual transistor development in 2000, the transistor was highly similar to the one Mead had originally described.
Nobel Prize controversies
The 1956 prize went to John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain and William Bradford Shockley "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect". However, the committee did not recognize numerous preceding patent applications. As early as 1928, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented several modern transistor types. In 1934, Oskar Heil patented a field-effect transistor. It is unclear whether Lilienfeld or Heil had built such devices, but they did cause later workers significant patent problems. Further, Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker, at Westinghouse Paris, applied for a patent in 1948 of an amplifier based on the minority carrier injection process. Mataré had first observed transconductance effects during the manufacture of germanium diodes for German radar equipment during World War II. Shockley was part of other controversies—including his position as a corporate director and his self-promotion efforts. Further, the original design Shockley presented to Brattain and Bardeen did not work. His share of the prize resulted from his development of the superior junction transistor, which became the basis of the electronics revolution. He excluded Brattain and Bardeen from the proceeds of this process, even though the idea may have been theirs. Another controversy associated with Shockley was his support of eugenics. He regarded his published works on this topic as the most important work of his career.
Mark Shepherd (businessman)
After obtaining the licensing agreement, Shepherd built a team to produce working transistors. In 1958, he was the head of the semiconductor team as Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit, which Texas Instruments used in the development of the company's hand-held calculators, printers and personal computers, as well as toys.
Morris Tanenbaum
Tanenbaum made significant contributions in the fields of transistor development and semiconductor manufacturing. 
Although it was not made public at the time, he developed the first silicon transistor, demonstrating it on January 26, 1954 at Bell Labs. He also helped develop the first gas-diffused silicon transistor, which convinced Bell administrators to support the use of silicon over germanium in their transistor design. He later led a team that developed the first high-field superconducting magnets.
Rufus P. Turner
Rufus Paul Turner (December 25, 1907 – March 25, 1982) was an academic, engineer, and author who published on semiconductor devices, technical writing style, and poet-novelist Charlotte Turner Smith. After three decades working with electronic devices – including developing the first practical transistor radio – he earned a doctorate in literature at age 52 and became an English professor. He wrote over 40 books and 3000 articles during his six-decade career.
Reading Works
On January 12, 1956, a diffused base transistor was unveiled at Laureldale before top military brass at a solid-state diffusion symposium. That was the same year that Bell Labs' scientists Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley received the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for the invention of the transistor. "Bell Laboratories scientists in Murray Hill, N.J., may have won the Nobel Prizes and gotten most of the press, but Allentown and Reading delivered the goods," notes Stuart W. Leslie, a historian of science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Grant O. Gale
From Bardeen, Gale acquired early versions of the transistor. One of Gale's most noted students was his former baby sitter, Robert Noyce, co-inventor of the integrated circuit and founder of Intel. While Noyce was his student at Grinnell:
Gale had kept up with Bardeen and his work, and he obtained two transistors in 1948 while Noyce was an undergraduate. Noyce worked with Gale on the transistor and was thus among the first to encounter its limitless potential.
Gale's mentorship of Noyce was also instrumental in protecting him from disciplinary action when Noyce stole a pig from a nearby farmer (who actually was also the Mayor) and then slaughtered it in Clark Hall for a college luau. The prank would have earned him expulsion and jail time since livestock theft was a felony offense in Iowa, if not for Gale's intervention. (The pig you refer to was actually slaughtered by Roger Barnes, a Hawaiian physics student in the fall of 1966. Mr. Barnes was encouraged and assisted by Richard Weeks of Palatine, Illinois and John Pittman of Lake Oswego, Oregon and elected by his housemates to prepare the feast. He was the only student who had any actual experience preparing a suckling pig for a luau. The festivities were halted when a maintenance man saw the pig hanging from the shower spigot and alerted the Dean of Men. The Dean surprised the assisting group of students who were just on a "study break" and ordered them to stop immediately. They were directed to take the carcass to the Saga Foods Dining Hall where it could be properly disposed of. The partially shaved and scrubbed pig may not have reached its intended destination and actually ended up at Clark Hall, the dormitory adjacent to the Dining Room. Thankfully. It was a cold night.)
Tom Kilburn
While Kilburn led one design team working on Meg, he led another with Dick Grimsdale and Douglas Webb, on a research project examining what he believed would be the next step forward in computer design: the use of transistors. The 48-bit machine they completed in November 1953 was the world's first transistor computer, with 550 diodes and 92 transistors, and was manufactured by STC. An improved version completed in April 1955 had 1,300 diodes and 200 transistors, and was sold by Metropolitan-Vickers as the Metrovick 950.
Semiconductor device
With the fragility problems solved, a remaining problem was purity. Making germanium of the required purity was proving to be a serious problem, and limited the yield of transistors that actually worked from a given batch of material. Germanium's sensitivity to temperature also limited its usefulness. Scientists theorized that silicon would be easier to fabricate, but few investigated this possibility. Gordon K. Teal was the first to develop a working silicon transistor, and his company, the nascent Texas Instruments, profited from its technological edge. From the late 1960s most transistors were silicon-based. Within a few years transistor-based products, most notably easily portable radios, were appearing on the market.
Jean Hoerni
In 1952, he moved to the United States to work at the California Institute of Technology, where he became acquainted with William Shockley, a physicist at Bell Labs who was intimately involved with the creation of the transistor.
Transistor
The thermionic triode, a vacuum tube invented in 1907, enabled amplified radio technology and long-distance telephony. The triode, however, was a fragile device that consumed a substantial amount of power. In 1909 physicist William Eccles discovered the crystal diode oscillator. Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed a patent for a field-effect transistor (FET) in Canada in 1925 , which was intended to be a solid-state replacement for the triode. Lilienfeld also filed identical patents in the United States in 1926 and 1928. However, Lilienfeld did not publish any research articles about his devices nor did his patents cite any specific examples of a working prototype. Because the production of high-quality semiconductor materials was still decades away, Lilienfeld's solid-state amplifier ideas would not have found practical use in the 1920s and 1930s, even if such a device had been built. In 1934, German inventor Oskar Heil patented a similar device in Europe.
History of the transistor
Scientists theorized that silicon would be easier to fabricate, but few bothered to investigate this possibility. Morris Tanenbaum et al. at Bell Laboratories were the first to develop a working silicon transistor on January 26, 1954. A few months later, Gordon Teal, working independently at Texas Instruments, developed a similar device. Both of these devices were made by controlling the doping of single silicon crystals while they were grown from molten silicon. A far superior method was developed by Morris Tanenbaum and Calvin S. Fuller at Bell Laboratories in early 1955 by the gaseous diffusion of donor and acceptor impurities into single crystal silicon chips.
Process variation (semiconductor)
The first mention of variation in semiconductors was by William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, in his 1961 analysis of junction breakdown.
Insulated-gate bipolar transistor
There are two important device concepts concerning IGBTs. First one is the device concept discovered by J. D. Plummer in 1978. US Patent Re.33209 was issued for the device concept. The device proposed by J. D. Plummer is the same structure as a thyristor with a MOS gate. J. D. Plummer discovered and proposed that the device can be used as a transistor although the device operates as a thyristor in higher current density level. J. D. Plummer reported this fact in his technical paper: "A MOS-Controlled Triac Devices" B.W. Scharf and J.D. Plummer, 1978 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, SESSION XVI FAM 16.6. The device proposed by J. D. Plummer is referred, here, as “Plummer’s device.” On the other hand, Hans W. Becke invented and proposed, in 1980, another new device in which the thyristor action is completely eliminated under any device operating conditions although the basic device structure is the same as that proposed by J. D. Plummer. The device invented by Hans W. Becke is referred, here, as “Becke’s device” and is described in US Patent 4364073. The difference between “Plummer’s device” and “Becke’s device” is that “Plummer’s device” has the mode of thyristor action in its operation range and “Becke’s device” never has the mode of thyristor action in its entire operation range. This is a critical point, because the thyristor action is the same as so-called “latch-up.” “Latch-up” is the main cause of fatal device failure. Thus, theoretically, “Plummer’s device” never realizes a rugged or strong power device which has a large safe operating area. The large safe operating area can be achieved only after “latch-up” is completely suppressed and eliminated in the entire device operation range. Hence, the invention of the device by Hans W. Becke is decisively more important. And, this is the real IGBT. However, the Becke's patent (US Patent 4364073) did not disclose any measures to realize actual devices.
History of science and technology in Japan
The parametron was a logic circuit element invented by Eiichi Goto in 1954. It was a digital computer element. Parametrons were used in Japanese computers from 1954 to the early 1960s, such as the University of Tokyo's PC-1 built in 1958, due to being reliable and inexpensive, but were ultimately surpassed by transistors due to differences in speed.The ETL Mark I, Japan's first digital automatic computer, began development in 1951 and was completed in 1952. It was developed by the Electrotechnical Laboratory using relays, based on the switching circuit theory formulated by Akira Nakashima in the 1930s and advanced by Goto Mochinori in the 1940s.The ETL Mark III began development in 1954, and was completed in 1956, created by Japan's Electrotechnical Laboratory. It was the first stored-program transistor computer. It used ultrasonic delay line memory.
William Shockley
The ensuing publicity generated by the "invention of the transistor" often thrust Shockley to the fore, much to the chagrin of Bardeen and Brattain. Bell Labs management, however, consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Though Shockley would correct the record where reporters gave him sole credit for the invention, he eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor. Bardeen began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951. Brattain refused to work with Shockley further and was assigned to another group. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain had much to do with the development of the transistor beyond the first year after its invention.
Walter Houser Brattain
On December 23, 1947, Walter Brattain, John Bardeen, and William B. Shockley demonstrated the first working transistor to their colleagues at Bell Laboratories. Amplifying small electrical signals and supporting the processing of digital information, the transistor is "the key enabler of modern electronics". The three men received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 "for research on semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor effect."
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (April 18, 1882 – August 28, 1963) was a Jewish American physicist and electronic engineer, credited with the first patents on the field-effect transistor (FET) (1925) and electrolytic capacitor (1931). Because of his failure to publish articles in learned journals and because high-purity semiconductor materials were not available yet, his FET patent never achieved fame, causing confusion for later inventors.
Semiconductor device
Semiconductors had been used in the electronics field for some time before the invention of the transistor. Around the turn of the 20th century they were quite common as detectors in radios, used in a device called a "cat's whisker" developed by Jagadish Chandra Bose and others. These detectors were somewhat troublesome, however, requiring the operator to move a small tungsten filament (the whisker) around the surface of a galena (lead sulfide) or carborundum (silicon carbide) crystal until it suddenly started working. Then, over a period of a few hours or days, the cat's whisker would slowly stop working and the process would have to be repeated. At the time their operation was completely mysterious. After the introduction of the more reliable and amplified vacuum tube based radios, the cat's whisker systems quickly disappeared. The "cat's whisker" is a primitive example of a special type of diode still popular today, called a Schottky diode.
Ralph Bown
Bown's work focused on electromagnetic propagation, particularly for radio broadcasting, ship-to-shore communication, aircraft radios, and intercontinental telephony. He was also an expert in radar, and served as a division member and consultant of the National Defense Research Committee and expert consultant to the Secretary of War; in 1941 he visited England to study radar in combat operations. Bown became research director at Bell Labs, and on June 30, 1948, led a press conference announcing the invention of the transistor.
Herbert Mataré
Herbert Franz Mataré (22 September 1912 – 2 September 2011) was a German physicist. The focus of his research was the field of semiconductor research. His best-known work is the first functional "European" transistor, which he developed and patented together with Heinrich Welker in the vicinity of Paris in 1948, at the same time and independently from the Bell Labs engineers. The final 20 years of his life Mataré split time between his homes in Hückelhoven, Germany and Malibu, California. Born in Aachen, he was the nephew of the sculptor Ewald Mataré (1887–1965) and father of architect Vitus Mataré (1955.)
History of electronic engineering
Vacuum tubes remained the preferred amplifying device for 40 years, until researchers working for William Shockley at Bell Labs invented the transistor in 1947. In the following years, transistors made small portable radios, or transistor radios, possible as well as allowing more powerful mainframe computers to be built. Transistors were smaller and required lower voltages than vacuum tubes to work.
Gordon Kidd Teal
When William Shockley's group at Bell Labs invented the transistor in 1947 Teal realized that substantial improvements in the device would result if it was fabricated using a single crystal, rather than the polycrystalline material then being used. He started a "boot-leg" project with very few resources or managerial support to make a simple crystal.
History of the transistor
Bray wrote: "That was the one aspect that we missed, but even had we understood the idea of minority carrier injection...we would have said, 'Oh, this explains our effects.' We might not necessarily have gone ahead and said, 'Let's start making transistors,' open up a factory and sell them... At that time the important device was the high back voltage rectifier".
Richard Grimsdale
In 1953, whilst still a post-graduate research student at Manchester University, Grimsdale achieved one of the first major landmarks in his career with his design and development work on the Metrovick 950, the world's first computer made from transistors rather than valves or electromechanical devices. The computer used early point-contact transistors which were the first generation of transistors, however later developments of the machine used more advanced junction transistors which offered better performance.
Russell Ohl
Russell Shoemaker Ohl (January 30, 1898 – March 20, 1987) was an American engineer who is generally recognized for patenting the modern solar cell (US Patent 2402662, "Light sensitive device").
Ohl was a notable semiconductor researcher prior to the invention of the transistor. He was also known as R.S. Ohl.
Surface-barrier transistor
In 1956-57, Remington Rand St. Paul Univac-division of Sperry Rand Corporation, had designed and built a transistorized "test" computer for the United States Air Force, which was called "TRANSTEC". It was designed by Univac's St. Paul engineer Seymour Cray, and used the Philco's high-frequency surface-barrier transistors in its computer's circuitry design. This was Univac's first computer designed with transistors and was used to test transistor logic circuits and also its speed and reliability, compared to magnetic amplifier (MAGSTEC) and vacuum tube circuit computers. After Univac had demonstrated the TRANSTEC computer to the United States Air Force, it was awarded a contract to build a transistorized ground guidance (Athena) ICBM defense computer.
Norm Winningstad
He graduated in 1948 as an expert in vacuum tubes, which was the same year Bell Labs developed the transistor. As the transistor would replace vacuum tubes in most applications, Winningstad later joked that he "graduated technically obsolete". He then worked at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in his hometown for a few years. He was married to Dolores, and they had two sons, Richard and Dennis, along with a daughter Joanne.
History of the transistor
There are numerous claimants to the title of the first company to produce practical transistor radios. Texas Instruments had demonstrated all-transistor AM radios as early as 1952, but their performance was well below that of equivalent battery tube models. A workable all-transistor radio was demonstrated in August 1953 at the Düsseldorf Radio Fair by the German firm Intermetall. It was built with four of Intermetall's hand-made transistors, based upon the 1948 invention of Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker.
However, as with the early Texas units (and others) only prototypes were ever built; it was never put into commercial production.
History of the transistor
Shockley was upset about the device being credited to Brattain and Bardeen, who he felt had built it "behind his back" to take the glory. Matters became worse when Bell Labs lawyers found that some of Shockley's own writings on the transistor were close enough to those of an earlier 1925 patent by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld that they thought it best that his name be left off the patent application.
John Bardeen
John Bardeen (; May 23, 1908 – January 30, 1991) was an American physicist and electrical engineer. He is the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.
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".
John Bardeen
Bardeen was honored on a March 6, 2008, United States postage stamp as part of the "American Scientists" series designed by artist Victor Stabin. The $0.41 stamp was unveiled in a ceremony at the University of Illinois. His citation reads: "Theoretical physicist John Bardeen (1908–1991) shared the Nobel Prize in Physics twice — in 1956, as co-inventor of the transistor and in 1972, for the explanation of superconductivity. The transistor paved the way for all modern electronics, from computers to microchips. Diverse applications of superconductivity include infrared sensors and medical imaging systems." The other scientists on the "American Scientists" sheet include biochemist Gerty Cori, chemist Linus Pauling and astronomer Edwin Hubble.
John Bertrand Johnson
Johnson was possibly among the first people to make a working field effect transistor, based on Julius Edgar Lilienfeld's US Patent 1,900,018 of 1928. In sworn testimony to the U.S. patent office in 1949, Johnson reported "...although the modulation index of 11 per cent is not great...the useful output power is substantial...it is in principle operative as an amplifier". On the other hand, in an article in 1964 he denied the operability of Lilienfeld's patent, saying "I tried conscientiously to reproduce Lilienfeld’s structure according to his specification and could observe no amplification or even modulation."
Les Hoffman
The invention of the transistor in 1948 must have had an effect on Leslie Hoffman. In the early 1950s, he took a major interest in solar cells, also called photovoltaic cells. When Bell Labs introduced the solar cell to the world in 1951 it was only a curiosity. It had a very poor light-to-electricity conversion efficiency of 2 percent, and was very fragile and expensive to fabricate. Several manufacturers, including Hoffman, managed to improve the efficiency to 4.5 percent by 1954, but photovoltaic cells were still impractical.
Hoffman made great strides in making the solar cell a practical and useful source of renewable energy. From 1957 to 1960, he improved its efficiency from 4.5 to 14 percent and lowered the production cost to make it a marketable item. One of Hoffman's great achievements was the first satellite to be powered by solar cells, the Vanguard 1, launched in 1958. The solar arrays or panels are Hoffman photovoltaic cells. In 1959 H. Leslie Hoffman received the David Packard Medal of Achievement for innovation. In 1959 he was one of the board of directors for the Electronic Industries Association (EIA).
Rufus P. Turner
Turner was involved with creating the 1N34A germanium diode at Sylvania in the 1940s. He began experimenting with germanium transistors soon after their invention in 1947. In 1949, before transistors were commercially available, he published the popular article "Build a Transistor", considered a "benchmark publication" in amateur radio. In January 1950, after commercial units were released, he published "A Crystal Receiver with Transistor Amplifier" in "Radio and Television News", along with plans for a three-transistor radio circuit. These plans – printed four years before the Regency TR-1 (the first commercial transistor radio) – were the first time most amateur radio operators were introduced to transistors as viable radio components. He continued development of his pocket-size radios as superior transistors became available, culminating in the 'widely read' "Transistor Portable with a "Punch"", an 'ambitious' four-transistor non-superheterodyne AM radio published in "Popular Electronics" in 1956.
History of the transistor
The world’s first transistor computer was built at the University of Manchester in November 1953. The computer was built by Richard Grimsdale, then a research student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and later a Professor of Electronic Engineering at Sussex University. The machine used point-contact transistors, made in small quantities by STC and Mullard. These consisted of a single crystal of germanium with two fine wires, resembling the crystal and cat’s whisker of the 1920s. These transistors had the useful property that a single transistor could possess two stable states. ... The development of the machine was severely hampered by the unreliability of the transistors, which consumed 150 watts.
Darlington transistor
Invented in 1953 by Sidney Darlington.
Power electronics
In 1947 the bipolar point-contact transistor was invented by Walter H. Brattain and John Bardeen under the direction of William Shockley at Bell Labs. In 1948 Shockley's invention of the bipolar junction transistor (BJT) improved the stability and performance of transistors, and reduced costs. By the 1950s, higher power semiconductor diodes became available and started replacing vacuum tubes. In 1956 the silicon controlled rectifier (SCR) was introduced by General Electric, greatly increasing the range of power electronics applications.
History of Sony
In the early 1950s, Ibuka traveled in Asia and heard about Bell Labs' invention of the transistor. He convinced Bell to license the transistor technology to his Japanese company. While most Japanese companies were researching the transistor for its military applications, Ibuka and Morita looked to apply it to communications. Although the American companies Regency Electronics and Texas Instruments built the first transistor radio as joint venture, it was Ibuka's company that made them commercially successful for the first time.
Norman Krim
According to Jack Ward's "Semiconductor Museum", Norman Krim is credited to inspire the transistor hobbyist and experimenter market with the creation of the CK721 and CK722. As Jack Ward, curator of the Semiconductor Museum website states, ""Many of the talented and dedicated professionals and amateurs who have been responsible for the tremendous rise of the electronics industry over the past four decades can still remember the time when, as a young hobbyist, they were able to scrape together enough money (maybe through saving allowance or cutting the neighbor’s grass) to buy that first CK722..."" From the CK722, came articles in electronic magazines, books and pamphlets on do it yourself building projects and competition from Raytheon's competitors notably General Electric who following Krim's lead of recycling out of specification transistors came up with the 2N107 transistor.
Transistor radio
A transistor radio is a small portable radio receiver that uses transistor-based circuitry. Following their development in 1954, made possible by the invention of the transistor in 1947, they became the most popular electronic communication device in history, with billions manufactured during the 1960s and 1970s. Their pocket size sparked a change in popular music listening habits, allowing people to listen to music anywhere they went. Beginning in the 1980s, however, cheap AM transistor radios were superseded by devices with higher audio quality such as portable CD players, personal audio players, boomboxes, and (eventually) smartphones, some of which contain radios themselves.
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.
Semiconductor device
While the device was constructed a week earlier, Brattain's notes describe the first demonstration to higher-ups at Bell Labs on the afternoon of 23 December 1947, often given as the birthdate of the transistor. What is now known as the "p–n–p point-contact germanium transistor" operated as a speech amplifier with a power gain of 18 in that trial. John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain, and William Bradford Shockley were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for their work.
History of the transistor
A transistor is a semiconductor device with at least three terminals for connection to an electric circuit. The vacuum-tube 
triode, also called a (thermionic) valve, was the transistor's precursor, introduced in 1907.
Organic field-effect transistor
The field-effect transistor (FET) was first proposed by J.E. Lilienfeld, who received a patent for his idea in 1930. He proposed that a field-effect transistor behaves as a capacitor with a conducting channel between a source and a drain electrode. Applied voltage on the gate electrode controls the amount of charge carriers flowing through the system.
The first field-effect transistor was designed and prepared in 1960 by Kahng and Atalla using a metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOSFET). However, rising costs of materials and manufacturing, as well as public interest in more environmentally friendly electronics materials have supported development of organic based electronics in more recent years. In 1987, Koezuka and co-workers reported the first organic field-effect transistor based on a polymer of thiophene molecules. The thiophene polymer is a type of conjugated polymer that is able to conduct charge, eliminating the need to use expensive metal oxide semiconductors. Additionally, other conjugated polymers have been shown to have semiconducting properties. OFET design has also improved in the past few decades. Many OFETs are now designed based on the thin-film transistor (TFT) model, which allows the devices to use less conductive materials in their design. Improvement on these models in the past few years have been made to field-effect mobility and on–off current ratios.
Walter Houser Brattain
Shockley believed (and stated) that he should have received all the credit for the discovery of the transistor. He actively excluded Bardeen and Brattain from new areas of research, in particular the junction transistor, which Shockley patented. Shockley's theory of the junction transistor was an "impressive achievement", pointing the way to future solid-state electronics, but it would be several years before its construction would become practically possible.
Herbert Kroemer
Kroemer was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. He always preferred to work on problems that are ahead of mainstream technology. In the 1950s, he invented the drift transistor and was the first to point out that advantages could be gained in various semiconductor devices by incorporating heterojunctions. Most notably, in 1963 he proposed the concept of the double-heterostructure laser, which is now a central concept in the field of semiconductor lasers. Kroemer became an early pioneer in molecular beam epitaxy, concentrating on applying the technology to untried new materials.
Heinrich Welker
While at the Westinghouse subsidiary in Paris, Welker and German physicist Herbert F. Mataré developed a point contact semiconductor amplifier, demonstrated in June 1948. This coincided with the announcement by Bell laboratory scientists of the demonstration of a point contact transistor on June 30, 1948. The French Westinghouse subsidiary applied for a patent on the same type of device on August 13, 1948. On 18 May 1949, this European invention coined as the "Le Transistron" or the "French transistor" was presented to the public, while a first batch of 1,000 devices was manufactured for the French telecommunications. This development was an outgrowth of work done by the two independently in Germany in programs to develop German radar. The French patent was granted in 1952.
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld
In the United States Lilienfeld did research on anodic aluminum oxide films, patenting the electrolytic capacitor in 1931, the method continuing to be used throughout the century. He also invented an "FET-like" transistor, filing several patents describing the construction and operation of transistors, as well as many features of modern transistors. (US patent #1,745,175 for an FET-like transistor was granted January 28, 1930.) When Brattain, Bardeen, and their colleague chemist Robert Gibney tried to get patents on their earliest devices, most of their claims were rejected due to the Lilienfeld patents.
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.
Jay Last
Fairchild's strategy for competing in the transistor market was to be fast and flexible. Rather than tying their research and development to lengthy 1-3 year military contracts, they financed development through Fairchild Camera. This enabled them to focus on promising ideas and develop them quickly. IBM was interested in obtaining transistors for a navigation computer for the B-70 bomber. Fairchild contracted to provide transistors to meet the specifications for IBM's core-memory driver. They developed complementary NPN and PNP transistors which could be used as a matched pair in a variety of circuit applications. Gordon Moore and David Allison worked on the NPN transistor, while Jean Hoerni developed the PNP transistor using boron diffusion. Scaling up to production of components in quantity presented major technological challenges, and Moore's NPN transistor was ready for production before Hoerni's PNP transistor. By August 1958, within 8 months of the company's creation, Fairchild was delivering Mesa transistors to IBM. Once it became available, the mesa transistor was desired for a wide variety of military applications. The speed with which it had been developed gave Fairchild a virtual monopoly on the fast-growing market for the next year. The most significant contract came from Autonetics, which was developing the navigation and control computer for the Minuteman ICBM.
Robert Noyce
After graduating from MIT in 1953, Noyce took a job as a research engineer at the Philco Corporation in Philadelphia. He left in 1956 to join William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor and eventual Nobel Prize winner, at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California.
Semiconductor device
Bell Telephone Laboratories needed a generic name for their new invention: "Semiconductor Triode", "Solid Triode", "Surface States Triode", "Crystal Triode" and "Iotatron" were all considered, but "transistor", coined by John R. Pierce, won an internal ballot. The rationale for the name is described in the following extract from the company's Technical Memoranda (May 28, 1948) [26] calling for votes:
Drift-field transistor
Invented by Herbert Kroemer at the Central Bureau of Telecommunications Technology of the German Postal Service, in 1953, it continues to influence the design of modern high-speed bipolar junction transistors.
Charlotte Davis Mooers
During World War II, Davis worked for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. In 1945, she was transferred to a facility in Newport, Rhode Island, but returned to the facility near Washington by early September that year. She was part of the Acoustic Division and, at one point, was under the supervision of John Bardeen, inventor of the transistor.
Field-effect transistor
The first type of JFET was the static induction transistor (SIT), invented by Japanese engineers Jun-ichi Nishizawa and Y. Watanabe in 1950. The SIT is a type of JFET with a short channel length. The metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), which largely superseded the JFET and had a profound effect on digital electronic development, was invented by Dawon Kahng and Martin Atalla in 1959.
Invention of the integrated circuit
In May 1952, Sidney Darlington filed a patent application in the United States for a structure with two or three transistors integrated onto a single chip in various configurations; in October 1952, Bernard Oliver filed a patent application for a method of manufacturing three electrically connected planar transistors on one semiconductor crystal. On May 21, 1953, Harwick Johnson filed a patent application for a method of forming various electronic components – transistors, resistors, lumped and distributed capacitances – on a single chip. Johnson described three ways of producing an integrated one-transistor oscillator. All of them used a narrow strip of a semiconductor with a bipolar transistor on one end and differed in the methods of producing the transistor. The strip acted as a series of resistors; the lumped capacitors were formed by fusion whereas inverse-biased p-n junctions acted as distributed capacitors. Johnson did not offer a technological procedure, and it is not known whether he produced an actual device. In 1959, a variant of his proposal was implemented and patented by Jack Kilby.
History of the transistor
Bell Telephone Laboratories needed a generic name for the new invention: "Semiconductor Triode", "Surface States Triode", "Crystal Triode", "Solid Triode" and "Iotatron" were all considered, but "Transistor," coined by John R. Pierce, was the clear winner of an internal ballot (owing in part to the affinity that Bell engineers had developed for the suffix "-istor"). The rationale for the name is described in the following extract from the company's Technical Memorandum calling for votes:
Semiconductor device
Shockley was incensed, and decided to demonstrate who was the real brains of the operation. A few months later he invented an entirely new, considerably more robust, type of transistor with a layer or 'sandwich' structure. This structure went on to be used for the vast majority of all transistors into the 1960s, and evolved into the bipolar junction transistor.
Digital Revolution
In 1947, the transistor was invented, leading the way to more advanced digital computers. From the late 1940s, Universities, the Military, and Business developed computer systems, to digitally replicate and automate previously manually performed mathematical calculations, with the LEO (computer) being the first commercially available general purpose computer.
History of the transistor
Prototypes of all-transistor AM radio receivers were demonstrated, but were really only laboratory curiosities. However, in 1950 Shockley developed a radically different type of solid-state amplifier which became known as the bipolar junction "transistor". Although it works on a completely different principle to the point-contact "transistor", this is the device which is most commonly referred to as simply a "transistor" today. Morgan Sparks made the bipolar junction transistor into a practical device. These were also licensed to a number of other electronics companies, including Texas Instruments, who produced a limited run of transistor radios as a sales tool. Early transistors were chemically unstable and only suitable for low-power, low-frequency applications, but as transistor design developed, these problems were slowly overcome.
Very Large Scale Integration
The history of the transistor dates to the 1920s when several inventors attempted devices that were intended to control current in solid-state diodes and convert them into triodes. Success came after World War II, when the use of silicon and germanium crystals as radar detectors led to improvements in fabrication and theory. Scientists who had worked on radar returned to solid-state device development. With the invention of transistors at Bell Labs in 1947, the field of electronics shifted from vacuum tubes to solid-state device.
Herman Fialkov
Herman Fialkov (23 March 1922 – 21 February 2012) was an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist. He is best known for co-founding the General Transistor Corp. in 1954, a technology company that became a pioneer of microchips. He graduated from New York University Tandon School of Engineering, formerly known as the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.
Radio receiver
The invention of the transistor in 1947 revolutionized radio technology, making truly portable receivers possible, beginning with transistor radios in the late 1950s. Although portable vacuum tube radios were made, tubes were bulky and inefficient, consuming large amounts of power and requiring several large batteries to produce the filament and plate voltage. Transistors did not require a heated filament, reducing power consumption, and were smaller and much less fragile than vacuum tubes.
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.
Bell Laboratories Building (Manhattan)
The site was also the home for part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. Shortly after the war, the transistor was invented here.