Shockley’s own efforts focused on the field-effect, while Bardeen and Brattain investigated ways to reduce the effects of surface states to make a viable solid-state device.

Now the work focused on the semiconductor elements germanium and silicon, because understanding of these had advanced greatly during the war from their development as crystal diode rectifiers in radar. Kelly reactivated the solid state amplifier/switch project in 1945, creating a new and larger group under the direction of Shockley and chemist Stanley Morgan, and including experimental physicist Walter Brattain and newly hired theoretical physicist John Bardeen. In 1940-1941, this project, along with almost everything else at Bell Labs, was put aside for war work. Shockley and a handful of colleagues began working on the problem, concentrating on theoretical work and on well understood semiconductors such as copper oxide. Kelly’s very first hire as research director was for this program, a young theoretical physicist from MIT, William Shockley. His hope was that a program of basic research in this area would lead to solid state electronic replacements for both the millions of moving, clanking electromechanical relays that were the chief components of telephone switches, and the bulky, hot, fragile vacuum tubes used to amplify telephone signals. Mervin Kelly, then newly promoted to the post of Director of Research, decided to form a research group on solid-state physics. This first demonstration was just one milestone on a research trajectory that had its start back in 1936. And unlike vacuum tubes (the then-standard electronic device), the amplification was instantaneous no warm-up time was required. They switched their invention in and out of an audio circuit, so those gathered could clearly hear the sound being amplified. A group of senior Bell Labs scientists and administrators gathered in a laboratory where physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain were about to demonstrate the first solid state amplifier, the point-contact transistor.

Dec.23 December 1947 was a snowy early winter day at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J.

15, 1947: Association for Computing Machinery Gets Whirring 18, 1947: Birth of the Cool (Company, That Is)

July 8, 1947: Roswell Incident Launches UFO Controversy.

July 6, 1947: The AK-47, an All-Purpose Killer.

June 17, 1947: Pan Am Launches 'Round-the-World Service.

April 28, 1947: Kon-Tiki Sets Sail From Peru to Polynesia.

April 16, 1947: Ship Explosion Ignites 3-Day Rain of Fire and Death.

21, 1947: 'Take a Polaroid' Enters the English Language Photo: William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain work at Bell Labs in the late 1940s. Bardeen became a professor at the University of Illinois in 1951, and he shared a second Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972, for the first successful explanation of superconductivity. Shockley left Bell Labs and founded Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View, California - one of the early high-tech companies in what would later become Silicon Valley.īrattain remained a fellow at Bell Labs. Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for the transistor, but the trio never worked together after the first few months of their initial creation of the transistor.

The invention revolutionized the world of electronics and became the basic building block upon which all modern computer technology rests. The transistor went on to replace bulky vacuum tubes and mechanical relays. In early 1948, he came up with the bipolar or junction transistor, a superior device that took over from the point-contact type.īell Labs publicly announced the first transistor at a press conference in New York on June 30, 1948. Shockley continued to work on the idea and refine it. Shockley was reported to have called it 'a magnificent Christmas present.' But Shockley himself was not present when it happened and was said to be bitter over losing out on that day. Also known as the ' little plastic triangle,' it became the first working solid-state amplifier.īardeen and Brattain demonstrated the transistor device to Bell Lab officials Dec. The final design of a point-contact transistorhad two gold contacts lightly touching a germanium crystal that was on a metal plate connected to a voltage source.

First transistor 1947