First Transistor
The tiny and powerful transistor shaped the future of electronics. A transistor is a device made up of semi-conductor material that can both insulate and conduct. Transistors exchange and regulate electronic current. Prior to transistors, digital circuits were represented by vacuum tubes.
John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain, scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, were researching the behavior of crystals (germanium) as semi-conductors in an effort to substitute vacuum tubes as mechanical relays in telecommunications. The vacuum tube, utilised to amplify music and voice, made long-distance calling possible, but the tubes exhausted power, produced heat and burned out quickly, demanding high maintenance. The team's research was nearly coming to a fruitless end when a last effort to try a finer substance as a contact point lead to the invention of the "point-contact" transistor amplifier.
The first point contact transistor employed the semiconductor germanium. Paper clips and razor blades were used to build the device. In 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain were seeking to understand the nature of the electrons at the interface between a metal and a semiconducting material. They recognized that by building two point contacts very close to each other, they could create a three terminal device - the first "point contact" transistor. They quickly built a couple of of these transistors and linked them with some other components to form an audio amplifier. This audio amplifier was presented to chief executives at Bell Telephone Company, who were extremely impressed that it didn't require time to "warm up" (as did the heaters in vacuum tube circuits). They instantly realized the power of this revolutionary technology.
This invention was the spark that ignited a vast research campaign in solid state electronics. Shockley had formulated a supposed junction transistor, which was assembled on thin slices of different types of semiconductor material compressed together. The junction transistor was simpler to understand in theory, and could be constructed more dependably. The transistor was the first device fashioned to act as both a transmitter, converting sound waves into electronic waves, and resistor, containing electronic current. The name transistor derives from the 'trans' of transmitter and 'sistor' of resistor. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain acquired a patent for their transistor. William Shockley applied for a patent for the transistor effect and a transistor amplifier.
Transistors changed the world of electronics and made a huge impact on computer design. Transistors constructed by semiconductors replaced tubes in the construction of computers. By replacing large and undependable vacuum tubes with transistors, computers could at once perform the same procedures, using less power and space. The transistor became the building block for all modern electronics and the basis for microchip and computer technology. Physicists John Bardeen, William B. Shockley, and Walter Brattain shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for collectively inventing the transistor, a solid-state device that could amplify electrical current. In 1972, Bardeen accepted a second Nobel Prize in Physics for the theory of superconductivity. The three scientists were inducted into the Inventor's Hall of Fame in 1974.
Return to our index page for more information on Internet Providers, advances in technology, PC tweaks, and a history of computers and the Internet.