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The transistor was invented at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, by scientists William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen from the University of Minnesota. Brattain and Bardeen usually worked without much supervision, as Shockley worked mostly from home. Their mission was to create the first amplifier using semiconductors.
The transistor was invented at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, by scientists William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen from the University of Minnesota.
==History==
Brattain and Bardeen usually worked without much supervision, as Shockley worked mostly from home. Their mission was to create the first amplifier using semiconductors.
Bardeen and Brattain were a perfect partnership, as Bardeen was a brilliant theoretician and Brattain a genius at experiments.
Bardeen and Brattain were a perfect partnership, as Bardeen was a brilliant theoretician and Brattain a genius at experiments.
Japanese engineers like Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita, who founded Sony Electronics, were successful in improving the manufacturing of transistors.
Japanese engineers like Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita, who founded Sony Electronics, were successful in improving the manufacturing of transistors.
==Significance==
Prior to the transistor, electronics relied on vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes made possible very sophisticated electronics, including broadcast radio and television as we know them, radar, and the first electronic computers.
But vacuum tubes are large, expensive, power-hungry, and unreliable. Vacuum tubes use filaments like light bulbs. A typical tube consumes as much power as a ten or twenty-watt bulb. When turned on, tubes need many minutes to "warm up" and stabilize. During this time, radios do not hold their tuning and "drift" away from stations.
Like light bulbs, vacuum tubes have a short life. Eventually the filament burns out and the tube needs to be replaced.
In a home radio with six tubes, tube failure was only a nuisance. In an electronic computer—like the 17,468-tube ENIAC—it was disastrous, because with that many tubes some would always be failing.
The telephone company was concerned with tubes as well. Telephone signals cannot travel thousands of miles under the sea without amplification. Built into the cable every few miles were ''repeaters,'' electronic amplifiers to keep boosting and restoring signal strength. It is not easy to replace a tube when it fails in a cable on the sea floor.
And the military, which was starting to use electronics, was concerned because tubes are made of glass and are fragile, unable to withstand G-forces and vibration.
The transistor ushered in the "solid-state revolution," and another revolution called "miniaturization." Compared to tubes, transistors were at least a hundred times smaller, used a hundred times less power, and were extremely stable and reliable. At first, the transistor changed things in small ways. The book-sized portable radios that used small tubes were displaced by pocket-sized "transistor radios." Over time, transistors completely reshaped the way in which electronics could be used and the things that could be done with it.
Originally "miniaturization" simply meant replacing light-bulb-sized tubes with jelly-bean-sized transistors. But a second breakthrough occurred in the 1960s, when engineers realized that the same technology used to create a single transistor on a semicondutor wafer could be used to create many interconnected transistors. Over time, engineers learned to put dozens, hundreds, thousand, and eventually millions of transistors onto a single chip, launching the "digital revolution."