Transistor

The transister 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.

Bardeen and Brattain were a perfect partnership, as Bardeen was a brilliant theoretician and Brattain a genius at experiments.

In December 1947, Bardeen had the insight that electrons formed a barrier on the surface, and Brattain worked that insight into a point-contact transistor. It used strips of gold foil on a plastic triangle, held in contact by a slab of germanium.

Shockley improved it to become the junction (sandwich) transistor. He mostly built it in a hotel room in Chicago. Once perfected, this was more durable than the point-contact transistor, and far easier to make. Upon this the semiconductor industry was built.

Bell Labs announced the invention to the public on June 30, 1948. Bell Labs engineer John Pierce gave it the name "transistor", a combination of "trans-resistance" with the names like thermistors.

Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley made very little money from their invention. Others, like Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce in founding Intel, made a fortune. This was true even though Shockley himself saw the potential and started the company upon which Silicon Valley was based.

Japanese engineers like Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita, who founded Sony Electronics, were successful in improving the manufacturing of transistors.