William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain

By Lucía Cárdenas

In December 1947, in a laboratory in Murray Hill, New Jersey, three men made the vacuum tube obsolete and did not know it yet. John Bardeen, a theorist, and Walter Brattain, an experimentalist, had been trying to build a field-effect amplifier out of germanium, and on December 16 their contraption, a sliver of germanium with two gold contacts pressed close together, amplified an electrical signal. It was ugly, fragile, and temperamental. It was the point-contact transistor, the first device that could amplify and switch electronic signals in solid matter, with no heated filament, no glass envelope, no warm-up time, at a fraction of the size and power. Their boss, William Shockley, had theorized the field effect but failed to make it work; stung at being left out of the breakthrough, he went home over the holidays and invented the better version, the junction transistor, a sandwich of semiconductor layers that became the practical foundation of the industry. All three worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, the research arm of AT&T, which had set them the problem because the telephone network was drowning in unreliable, power-hungry vacuum tubes. Bell announced the transistor in June 1948 with studied modesty; the press barely noticed. Then the world caught up. The junction transistor made hearing aids small, radios pocket-sized, and computers thinkable at scale; Texas Instruments' engineers built the first transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, in 1954, and Sony's version conquered the world. Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Bardeen went on to co-invent the theory of superconductivity and win a second Nobel, the only person to win two physics Nobels. Shockley left to found his own semiconductor company in California, seeding, through the defections of his unhappy employees, the entire Silicon Valley. Brattain stayed in research and teaching. The transistor they built is now manufactured by the trillion, the most-produced artifact in human history, and every one of them is a descendant of that germanium sliver. The announcement in June 1948 was almost comically understated: Bell Labs invited the press, demonstrated the transistor amplifying a voice, and watched the newspapers bury the story inside. The military understood immediately and classified the details; everyone else took years. Shockley's junction transistor, patented and announced in 1951, was the version that mattered commercially, easier to manufacture and more reliable than the fragile point-contact device. In 1956 Shockley left Bell to found Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View, California, luring brilliant young engineers with the promise of the future and then driving them away with paranoia and mismanagement. In 1957 eight of them, the 'traitorous eight,' quit to found Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that would invent the integrated circuit and the planar process; Fairchild's alumni then founded Intel, AMD, and half of Silicon Valley. Bardeen, the only one of the three without an ego invested in the business, returned to the University of Illinois, where with Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer he cracked superconductivity, the BCS theory, and won his second Nobel Prize in 1972, still the only double physics laureate in history. Brattain stayed at Bell, then taught at Whitman College. The point-contact transistor itself was obsolete within a decade, but its descendants now number in the trillions manufactured each year, and the industry it founded employs millions.

Impact on civilization

The transistor is the physical basis of the information age. By replacing the vacuum tube with a speck of semiconductor, it made electronics small, cool, reliable, and cheap, and therefore ubiquitous: without it there are no computers worth the name, no internet, no mobile phones, no digital anything. It is the reason the twentieth century's second half looks nothing like its first. The device also created the semiconductor industry, the most strategically consequential industry on earth, and the economic geography of Silicon Valley, Taiwan, and Shenzhen. Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley did not merely improve the amplifier; they changed the substrate of civilization from glass and hot wire to crystal, and everything electronic since has been built on that crystal. The transistor also reorganized the geography of innovation. Bell Labs' model, a regulated monopoly funding open-ended research, produced the device; Silicon Valley's model, startups spinning out of startups, commercialized it. The handoff from one model to the other, mediated by Shockley's failed company and Fairchild's defectors, became the template for how deep technology reaches the market. Every startup equity split and every venture-funded spinout descends, culturally if not legally, from the traitorous eight walking out of Shockley Semiconductor in 1957.