Crystal Fire #1

Crystal Fire is a book about the invention of transistors, microchips, integrated circuits, and the birth of the information age.

On December 23, 1947 William Shockley arrived at his workplace, Bell Labs, eager for some news. Shockley was head of the solid-state physics group, and two people in his group had made an exciting discovery. The two were John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. Using little more than a slab of germanium, a thin plastic wedge, and a strip of gold foil, they had recently boosted an electrical signal almost a hundredfold. It was dubbed “transistor.” It was an archetypal moment, akin to 70 years earlier when Alexander Graham Bell said, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.”

Shockley had been seeking ways to fashion a solid-state device to replace the bulky, unreliable switches and amplifiers commonly used in phone equipment. By January, 1948 Shockley had figured out the important details of his own “junction” design – different from Bardeen’s and Brattain’s “point contact” design – which he believed would be more reliable and easier to mass-produce.

It took a couple more years to perfect the techniques to grow germanium crystals. It took a few more years to figure out how to improve and mass-produce the “junction” design to replace the “point contact” design well underway in manufacturing.

Bardeen departed Bell Labs in 1951. Shockley departed in 1955 for Silicon Valley to start a transistor-making company. They and Brattain met again in Stockholm in 1956 to receive the Nobel Prize for inventing the transistor.

By the mid-1950’s physicists and engineers began recognizing the transistor’s significance. A small innovative company, Texas Instruments, began producing small, portable transistor radios. A little-known Japanese company named Sony soon surpassed Texas Instruments. By 1961 transistors were the basis of a billion-dollar semiconductor industry. The majority of transistors in that era were used in radar and guided missile systems.

Another more technical source about the history of transistors is here.