BTW, iirc, the original transistor was a FET.
Posted on 12/15/2007 7:01:52 AM PST by shrinkermd
...A transistor is a little electronic switch capable of amplifying electric current, invented by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley at Bell Labs in New Jersey on Dec. 16, 1947. They jury-rigged the first transistor using a paper clip, some germanium and gold foil, and found that it boosted electrical current a hundredfold. They kept the discovery to themselves for a bit, and showed their bosses the device just before Christmas. Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956.
...To put it in economic terms, if the price of an automobile had kept pace with the price drop of a transistor, we would be paying less for a car than for a slice of pizza.
In the next few years, the question is whether the semiconductor industry can sustain this relentless progress. Further shrinking transistors is proving problematic as certain fundamental physical barriers are being reached. At the same time, new frontiers are opening up. The quest is on to create efficient transistors that use and boost light instead of electricity, which will enable much faster processing speeds.
So on its 60th birthday, answer your cellphone, boot up your computer, flip on your iPod -- and in the process, toast the incredible transistor, the humble electronic switch that, in two human generations, has forever changed how we live, work and play.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
BTW, iirc, the original transistor was a FET.
I believe the backstory was that they were specifically told not to work on transistors, or rather any semiconductor devices, since there was no word for transistor ("transresistance amplifer") at the time. Their assignment was to investigate the electrical properties of semiconductors, perhaps with an eye towards applying them as solid state rectifiers, in itself a significant advance.
Once you begin to think about how semiconductors work, the idea of a FET (field effect transistor, as opposed to junction transistor) pretty much screams right out at you. Junction transistors are a little more subtle. Once you start making semiconductor amplifiers in serious quantities, someone will hit on the idea.
Bzzzzzt.
“Telephone” is from the 19th century.
Yeah, a clean butt is where it's at.
That would explain why GE’s 660 page “Transistor Manual” would only cost $2 in 1964...
2) The humble transistor was neither discovered nor invented at Bell labs. It was re-discovered there.
As cited in Tom Burnham's More Misinformation (Ballantine, 1980), Julius Edgar Lilienfield filed a Canadian patent application for what we now call a "transistor" in 1925. In 1930, he was granted a U.S patent for the invention.
Lilienfield did not fully understand the theory behind his invention, but inventors are not required to understand their inventions to receive a patent as long as the inventions actually work.
See also Theodore L. Thomas, "The Twenty Lost Years of Solid-State Physics". Analog: Science fact and Fiction, March 1965, pages 8 ff.
Not the first. The first transistor was Lilienfeld's 1930, a FET device. Nearly all but a very few transistors in use today are FET devices.
See http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/history/lilienfeld.htm.
Geesh. But mine has the picture!
so noted.
close enough?
ping
Placed one under the other, our earlier posts do present a pretty convinving argument for Lilienfield as the inventor of the transistor.
Wasn’t a semiconductor transistor, though, was it. Metal oxide solid state rectifiers were commonly in use for small signals, but not practical for power in 1947. As far as I know, no one ever commercialized a non-semiconductor transistor.
one origin: “(”transresistance amplifer”) “
another: TRANSfer + resISTOR = TRANS ISTOR
from early diagrams of the transistor showing how forward biasing one junction and reverse biasing the other to show the amplification power gain (where the junctions are shown as essentially simple resistors).
Actually, the transistor is founded on a pyramid of semiconductor knowledge. In 1833, Michael Faraday made perhaps the first contribution to semiconductor research...during an experiment with silver sulfide, observing its resistance varied inversely w/ Temperature (opposite of conductors).
Honorable Mention.
" There are few living men whose insights and professional accomplishments have changed the world. Jack Kilby is one of these men. His invention of the monolithic integrated circuit - the microchip - some 40 years ago at Texas Instruments (TI) laid the conceptual and technical foundation for the entire field of modern microelectronics. It was this breakthrough that made possible the sophisticated high-speed computers and large-capacity semiconductor memories of today's information age.
Base, Collector, Emitter. Never forget.
They all pale to VIAGRA ;-)
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