December 23, 1947: Bell Labs Invents the Transistor

The 1st working transistor. Yes, it has been preserved.

December 23, 1947, 75 years ago: Bell Telephone Laboratories, or Bell Labs for short, announces the invention of the transistor at its headquarters at Murray Hill, in the Township of Berkeley Heights, Union County, New Jersey.

According to Wikipedia:

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electrical signals and power. The transistor is one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. It is composed of semiconductor material, usually with at least three terminals for connection to an electronic circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals controls the current through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled (output) power can be higher than the controlling (input) power, a transistor can amplify a signal. Some transistors are packaged individually, but many more are found embedded in integrated circuits...

The first working device to be built was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs. The three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement...

Transistors revolutionized the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers, among other things.

Left to right: John Bardeen, William Shockley, Walter Brattain

In 1963, Shockley went west, teaching at Stanford University between San Francisco and San Jose, leading to the region being known as Silicon Valley, for the element used in most transistors. Sadly, he also began to use his brilliant mind to pass off twisted theories of eugenics. He argued that black people were genetically inferior to white people, and that no amount of social assistance from government would make any difference.

In 1981, a science writer for the Atlanta Constitution compared Shockley's beliefs with those of the Nazis. Shockley sued for libel. He won the case, and was awarded one dollar in damages. In other words, the damage done was to his ego, for he had already damaged his own reputation with his statements. He died in 1989.

Nevertheless, we owe these 3 men a great deal, for all the technology that transistors have made possible -- including the transistor radios on which we've listened to sporting events and the Top 40 songs.

Bardeen won a 2nd Nobel Prize in 1972, with Leon Cooper and John R. Schrieffer, for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity. He lived until 1991. Brattain died in 1987.

The court-ordered breakup of AT&T led to the 2007 loss of Bell Labs to the company. The Labs are now run by a competitor, Japanese company Nokia.