The Transistor Turns 65 Today

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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May 9, 2000
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When you stop to think about all of the technological marvels that we have around us now, it’s hard to imagine the world without them. The transistor, one of the inventions that brought technology to where we are today, was created a mere 65 years ago today at Bell Labs.

The device is jointly credited to William Shockley (1910-1989), John Bardeen (1908-1991) and Walter Brattain (1902-1987), and it was Bardeen and Brattain who operated the first working point-contact transistor during an experiment conducted on 16 December 1947
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What have they done lately? All of them are dead. /bad troll

I think sometimes people take for granted how revolutionary an application of quantum physics the transistor was. In their time this stuff was bleeding edge.
 
pxc said:
What have they done lately? All of them are dead. /bad troll

I think sometimes people take for granted how revolutionary an application of quantum physics the transistor was. In their time this stuff was bleeding edge.
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Or in today's world: "magical".

Think about it, I haven't heard that "bleeding edge" phrase for quite a while....

Damn Apple.
 
Red Falcon said:
At least Apple hasn't patented the transistor. :rolleyes:
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Don't give them any bad ideas. :D They'll patent relays and vacuum tubes while they're at it. :p

It is indeed incredible to think how revolutionary the transistor is, it is in pretty much all electronics. It serves a simple task on it's own but can create very complex circuits in a small size.
 
It's pretty amazing seeing what the last century gave us. In 1903 we flew for the first time with a heavier than air craft. By 1947 the sound barrier had been broken in horizontal flight. And by 1969 we had landed humans upon the face of another world. And those are three feats just within aviation. What humans can do when allowed to compete, to learn, to study, and ultimately, to better ourselves is just remarkable. And, given what we did in the last century and what has been accomplished in the first 13 of this century thus far, I think we will be absolutely unable to recognize the world come 2100. Technology is still growing exponentially and that is absolutely exciting.
 
blitzkommando said:
It's pretty amazing seeing what the last century gave us. In 1903 we flew for the first time with a heavier than air craft. By 1947 the sound barrier had been broken in horizontal flight. And by 1969 we had landed humans upon the face of another world. And those are three feats just within aviation. What humans can do when allowed to compete, to learn, to study, and ultimately, to better ourselves is just remarkable. And, given what we did in the last century and what has been accomplished in the first 13 of this century thus far, I think we will be absolutely unable to recognize the world come 2100. Technology is still growing exponentially and that is absolutely exciting.
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Welcome to the Singularity
 
I think the singularity was supposed to be around 2050 or so? I wish we had cryogenics technology pinned down. I'd love to freeze myself for one or two centuries and see the world, assuming we hadn't destroyed ourselves by then.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Don't give them any bad ideas. :D They'll patent relays and vacuum tubes while they're at it. :p

It is indeed incredible to think how revolutionary the transistor is, it is in pretty much all electronics. It serves a simple task on it's own but can create very complex circuits in a small size.
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The actual history around the development of the transistor is fascinating.
Actually these 3 guys were not super scientists; but curious about the right things.
The "detecting" properties of crystals (semiconductor) was well known. And they were trying to discover how it worked.
The biggest difference between guys like us and scientists is we don't have a big company or a fat government grant to pay for our experimentation.

Deforest who is credited with inventing the triode vacuum tube really did this without any scientific background at all. He was playing around with a diode vacuum tube (rectifier) and added a 3rd element to see what would happen.
He found that a small signal on the 3rd element could vary the current in the other 2 elements and the result was a big signal; in other words an amplifier. But Deforest really had no idea how it worked scientifically. The same with Edison. He invented the light bulb by finding hundreds of materials that did not work for a filament. Until he tried tungsten.
 
Azhar said:
Suspicious! Alien technology?
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George-Tsoukalos_Aliens.jpg
 
It's a shame Bell labs mostly went the way of the dinosaurs when Bell lost its monopoly on telecommunications. During their prime they really were world leaders in basic and applied physics research.
 
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