“After 14 years of work I was beginning to lose faith . . .” These were the words of Walter Brattain, the eldest of the three men credited with the invention of the transistor.

John Bardeen, the second of the three inventors, was a relative newcomer; he had been working on semiconductor theory with Bell Labs only 4 years.

The third inventor, William Shockley, was the supervisor of the small group. He had been working on the theory of semiconductors for about 10 years, and while he could work out the theory of such a device he could not build a working model.

These three people, born 1902, 1908, and 1910 respectively, were not strangers to each other. All three were involved with quantum mechanics, and as such had been in contact over the years, primarily in graduate school. Then they ended up in the same group at Bell Labs.

Although the three inventors were similar in many ways – education, professional acquaintances, and an interest in quantum mechanics – they were in other ways quite dissimilar. Walter Brattain was the skilled tinker; he could put together any contraption asked. John Bardeen was the thinker; a man who could look at an event or experiment, and make sense of it. William Shockley was the visionary; it was he who would predict how important the transistor would be well in advance of anyone else. This group brought together through their diverse talents the perfect environment for the development of the transistor.

They were working on solid state devices that would achieve amplification, much as did a triode vacuum tube. The going wasn’t easy. On one occasion Brattain was studying how electrons acted on the surface of a semiconductor. But condensation kept forming on the silicon and messing up the experiment. Frustrated, he got rid of the condensation by dumping the whole experiment into a thermos of water. Amazingly it worked, and a significant amount of amplification was achieved.

On another occasion Bardeen and Brattain experimented with germanium dioxide – a slab of germanium with a thin coating of shimmering green oxide on one side. But in preparing the experiment Brattain inadvertently washed the oxide off the slab, and when proceeding with the experiment that now shouldn’t work, it did work. Now isn’t that interesting, thought the two.

Disclosure to upper management took place on December 23, 1947, and on December 24 the project was officially documented and witnessed. In 1955 the three received the Nobel prize in physics for their work.

The transistor invented by and demonstrated by Bardeen and Brattain was the point contact transistor. Shockley had not been personally involved – and he was not a happy camper. He believed that the other two had taken his ideas, and developed them, unbeknownst to him. In fact, he had provided a good deal of the background, but he had not been involved with the invention. Not to be outdone, Shockley continued his work, and several months later developed a slightly different, and certainly superior, transistor: the junction transistor.

Now, just what is a transistor, arguably identified as the most important invention of the 20th Century?

As mentioned above, it performs essentially the same function as did the triode vacuum tube: it takes a weak signal (voice, music, etc.) and amplifies it. Or, when used as a switch, it turns a signal on or off. Initially the transistor was the size of a garden pea; in later years it got smaller and smaller, and to this day that trend continues. (Most recently it was announced that several million transistors could be placed on the head of a pin) The transistor was a solid device (i.e., electrons that traveled from one of the three wires to another traveled through a solid material rather than through a vacuum). A vacuum tube used a red hot filament to “boil” electrons off the cathode; this was not required with the transistor, nor was a high voltage required; flashlight batteries worked perfectly well.

The invention of the transistor ushered in the modern electronic era. Without the transistor we would not have computers, cellphones, hand-held calculators, or any of the vast assortments of industrial devices that make for better living around the world.

Bob Stoffels is a telecommunications consultant, with more than 50 years of experience. He can be reached  at 727.867.5378 or emailed at: stoffels@juno.com.