TECHNOLOGY

The Transistor

1947 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

In December 1947, at Bell Labs, a sliver of germanium with two gold contacts amplified a signal: the transistor, a valve with no vacuum, no filament and almost no size. Its descendants shrank by the million-fold; the MOSFET variant of 1959 has since been manufactured in the sextillions, more copies than any other human artefact. Every computer, phone, car and appliance on Earth is a lattice of these switches.

Why it matters

The transistor is the atom of the information age: Moore's law is just its repeated halving, and the entire digital world, from the web to AI, is transistors all the way down. Its history also corrects the lone-eureka myth, decades of semiconductor oddities were integrated by an industrial lab into one device. By count of copies and reach of consequence, it is arguably the most consequential invention of the twentieth century.

Dating & uncertainty

Bardeen and Brattain demonstrated transistor action at Bell Labs in December 1947, with Shockley's junction design following; all three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize. Historians add nuance: the solid-state amplifier emerged from decades of semiconductor anomalies and designs that Bell Labs integrated, and the dominant MOSFET form arrived in 1959, now the most manufactured object in history.

Sources

1. Iwai, Kakushima & Ohmi (2022), The Electrochemical Society Interface · The transistor was invented 75 years ago: a big milestone in human historydoi:10.1149/2.f13224if
2. Brinkman, Haggan & Troutman (1997), IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits · A history of the invention of the transistor and where it will lead usdoi:10.1109/4.643644
3. Metzler (2020), SSRN · The transistor, an emerging invention: Bell Labs as a systems integrator rather than a 'house of magic'doi:10.2139/ssrn.3678081

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