The transistor, fundamental to all modern technology, including telecommunications, data communications, aviation, and audio and video recording equipment, was invented on December 16, 1947 – although even several years later, it was regarded as a remarkable achievement.
Behind the discovery are three scientists – Walter Brattain, John Bardeen and William Shockley – who would share the Nobel Prize in Physics in December of the following year for this discovery.
But an important role was played by another person, Marvin Kelley, the head of Bell Laboratories, who, after the end of World War II, brought together these scientists to develop a solid-state semiconductor switch that would replace the problematic tube vacuum. He believed that for research to be successful, the aims of which remained largely general, required a multifaceted approach. The team would use some of the advances made during the war that had made radar possible.
In the spring of 1945, Shockley had designed what he hoped would be the first semiconductor amplifier, but without success. Bardeen, for his part, who was a theorist, proposed experiments to interpret their results, while Brattain was the one who turned theory into practice. Despite the failures and the tensions that arose between the three scientists, the team continued to experiment.
Finally, on December 16, 1947, they built the point-contact transistor, made of strips of gold foil in a plastic triangle, pushed into contact with a plate of germanium. Shockley would further work on the concept and evolve the build. His version took a total of four weeks of paper work, and another two years to create the device, which was more robust and practical than Bardeen and Brattain’s point-contact transistor, and at the same time much easier to manufacture, so that it could be converted in the central artifact of the electronic age.
Bardeen and Brattain felt that they were “sidelined”, which had a negative effect on the team, since the environment was now highly competitive. Differences would grow further as there was the question of which names would appear on the patent, as well as who should appear in photographs.
Bell Laboratories decided to unveil the invention on June 30, 1948. At first it was not given much attention, both by the press and industry. Despite all that, the people in charge had realized that the transistor could be used in applications beyond telecommunications. So it proceeded by offering licenses to any companies that wished to apply, in return for contributing their own patents to a joint pool.
One of the first companies to accept the proposal was Japanese, which took its first steps shortly after World War II and had international ambitions, as its English-language name Sony revealed. A few years later, eight of the partners who worked alongside Shockley in California after he resigned from Bell Labs would start their own company under the name Intel. Both remain among the largest worldwide to this day.
Column editor: Myrto Katsigera, Vassilis Minakakis, Antigoni-Despina Poimenidou, Athanasios Syroplakis
