The transistor is a semiconductor switch invented at Bell Labs in December 1947 by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley — 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. It replaced the bulky, hot, fragile vacuum tube as the basic building block of electronics — tiny, cool, reliable — and made the integrated circuit, the computer and the smartphone possible.
On 23 December 1947 the team demonstrated the first point-contact transistor: a sliver of germanium with two gold contacts that amplified an electrical signal. It was ugly and finicky, but it worked — and within a decade transistors were in hearing aids, radios and computers, shrinking electronics from room-size to pocket-size.
