TRANSISTOR...Invention

Fascinating facts about the invention of Transistors by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley in 1947. TRANSISTOR
Almost every piece of equipment that stores, transmits, displays, or manipulates information has at its core silicon chips filled with electronic circuitry. These chips each house many thousands or even millions of transistors. The history of the transistor begins with the dramatic scientific discoveries of the 1800's scientists like Maxwell, Hertz, Faraday, and Edison made it possible to harness electricity for human uses. Inventors like Braun, Marconi, Fleming, and DeForest applied this knowledge in the development of useful electrical devices like radio.
Their work set the stage for the Bell Labs scientists whose challenge was to use this knowledge to make practical and useful electronic devices for communications. Teams of Bell Labs scientists, such as Shockley, Brattain, Bardeen, and many others met the challenge.--and invented the information age. They stood on the shoulders of the great inventors of the 19th century to produce the greatest invention of the our time: the transistor. The transistor was invented in 1947 at Bell Telephone Laboratories by a team led by physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. At first, the computer was not high on the list of potential applications for this tiny device. This is not surprising—when the first computers were built in the 1940s and 1950s, few scientists saw in them the seeds of a technology that would in a few decades come to permeate almost every sphere of human life. Before the digital explosion, transistors were a vital part of improvements in existing analog systems, such as radios and stereos. When it was placed in computers, however, the transistor became an integral part of the technology boom. They are also capable of being mass-produced by the millions on a sliver of silicon—the semiconductor chip. It is this almost boundless ability to integrate transistors onto chips that has fueled the information age. Today these chips are not just a part of computers. They are also important in devices as diverse as video cameras, cellular phones, copy machines, jumbo jets, modern automobiles, manufacturing equipment, electronic scoreboards, and video games. Without the transistor there would be no Internet and no space travel. In the years following its creation, the transistor gradually replaced the bulky, fragile vacuum tubes that had been used to amplify and switch signals. The transistor became the building block for all modern electronics and the foundation for microchip and computer technology.