History of the transistor - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Invention of the transistor

The first patent

Patent

A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

for the field-effect transistor

Field-effect transistor

The field-effect transistor is a transistor that relies on an electric field to control the shape and hence the conductivity of a channel of one type of charge carrier in a semiconductor material. FETs are sometimes called unipolar transistors to contrast their single-carrier-type operation with...

principle was filed in Canada by Austrian-Hungarian

Austria-Hungary

Austria-Hungary , more formally known as the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen, was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in...

physicist

Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

Julius Edgar Lilienfeld

Julius Edgar Lilienfeld was an Austro-Hungarian physicist. He was born in Lemberg in Austria-Hungary , moved to the United States in the early 1920s, and became American citizen in 1934...

on October 22, 1925, but Lilienfeld published no research articles about his devices, and they were ignored by industry. In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil

Oskar Heil

Oskar Heil was a German electrical engineer and inventor. He studied physics, chemistry, mathematics, and music at the Georg-August University of Göttingen and was awarded his PhD in 1933, for his work on molecular spectroscopy.-Personal life:At the Georg-August University in Göttingen, Oskar Heil...

patented another field-effect transistor. There is no direct evidence that these devices were built, but later work in the 1990s show that one of Lilienfeld's designs worked as described and gave substantial gain. Legal papers from the Bell Labs

Bell Labs

Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...

patent show that William Shockley

William Shockley

William Bradford Shockley Jr. was an American physicist and inventor. Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s...

and a co-worker at Bell Labs, Gerald Pearson, had built operational versions from Lilienfeld's patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles.

The work emerged from their war-time efforts to produce extremely pure germanium

Germanium

Germanium is a chemical element with the symbol Ge and atomic number 32. It is a lustrous, hard, grayish-white metalloid in the carbon group, chemically similar to its group neighbors tin and silicon. The isolated element is a semiconductor, with an appearance most similar to elemental silicon....

"crystal" mixer diode

Diode

In electronics, a diode is a type of two-terminal electronic component with a nonlinear current–voltage characteristic. A semiconductor diode, the most common type today, is a crystalline piece of semiconductor material connected to two electrical terminals...

s, used in radar

Radar

Radar is an object-detection system which uses radio waves to determine the range, altitude, direction, or speed of objects. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. The radar dish or antenna transmits pulses of radio...

units as a frequency mixer

Frequency mixer

In electronics a mixer or frequency mixer is a nonlinear electrical circuit that creates new frequencies from two signals applied to it. In its most common application, two signals at frequencies f1 and f2 are applied to a mixer, and it produces new signals at the sum f1 + f2 and difference f1 -...

element in microwave

Microwave

Microwaves, a subset of radio waves, have wavelengths ranging from as long as one meter to as short as one millimeter, or equivalently, with frequencies between 300 MHz and 300 GHz. This broad definition includes both UHF and EHF , and various sources use different boundaries...

radar receivers. A parallel project on germanium diodes at Purdue University

Purdue University

Purdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...

succeeded in producing the good-quality germanium semiconducting crystals that were used at Bell Labs.

Early tube-based technology did not switch fast enough for this role, leading the Bell team to use solid state diode

Diode

s instead. With this knowledge in hand they turned to the design of a triode

Triode

A triode is an electronic amplification device having three active electrodes. The term most commonly applies to a vacuum tube with three elements: the filament or cathode, the grid, and the plate or anode. The triode vacuum tube was the first electronic amplification device...

, but found this was not at all easy. John Bardeen

John Bardeen

John Bardeen was an American physicist and electrical engineer, the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon Neil Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a...

eventually developed a new branch of quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics, also known as quantum physics or quantum theory, is a branch of physics providing a mathematical description of much of the dual particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter. It departs from classical mechanics primarily at the atomic and subatomic...

known as surface physics to account for the "odd" behavior they saw, and Bardeen and Walter Brattain eventually succeeded in building a working device.

After the war, Shockley decided to attempt the building of a triode

Triode

-like semiconductor device. He secured funding and lab space, and went to work on the problem with Bardeen and Brattain.

The key to the development of the transistor was the further understanding of the process of the electron mobility

Electron mobility

In solid-state physics, the electron mobility characterizes how quickly an electron can move through a metal or semiconductor, when pulled by an electric field. In semiconductors, there is an analogous quantity for holes, called hole mobility...

in a semiconductor. It was realized that if there was some way to control the flow of the electrons from the emitter to the collector of this newly discovered diode, one could build an amplifier

Amplifier

Generally, an amplifier or simply amp, is a device for increasing the power of a signal.In popular use, the term usually describes an electronic amplifier, in which the input "signal" is usually a voltage or a current. In audio applications, amplifiers drive the loudspeakers used in PA systems to...

. For instance, if you placed contacts on either side of a single type of crystal the current would not flow through it. However if a third contact could then "inject" electrons or holes into the material, the current would flow.

Actually doing this appeared to be very difficult. If the crystal were of any reasonable size, the number of electrons (or holes) required to be injected would have to be very large -– making it less than useful as an amplifier because it would require a large injection current to start with. That said, the whole idea of the crystal diode was that the crystal itself could provide the electrons over a very small distance, the depletion region. The key appeared to be to place the input and output contacts very close together on the surface of the crystal on either side of this region.

Brattain started working on building such a device, and tantalizing hints of amplification continued to appear as the team worked on the problem. Sometimes the system would work but then stop working unexpectedly. In one instance a non-working system started working when placed in water. The electrons in any one piece of the crystal would migrate about due to nearby charges. Electrons in the emitters, or the "holes" in the collectors, would cluster at the surface of the crystal where they could find their opposite charge "floating around" in the air (or water). Yet they could be pushed away from the surface with the application of a small amount of charge from any other location on the crystal. Instead of needing a large supply of injected electrons, a very small number in the right place on the crystal would accomplish the same thing.

Their understanding solved the problem of needing a very small control area to some degree. Instead of needing two separate semiconductors connected by a common, but tiny, region, a single larger surface would serve. The emitter and collector leads would both be placed very close together on the top, with the control lead placed on the base of the crystal. When current was applied to the "base" lead, the electrons or holes would be pushed out, across the block of semiconductor, and collect on the far surface. As long as the emitter and collector were very close together, this should allow enough electrons or holes between them to allow conduction to start.

An early witness of the phenomenon was Ralph Bray, a young graduate student. He joined the germanium effort at Purdue University in November 1943 and was given the tricky task of measuring the spreading resistance at the metal-semiconductor contact. Bray found a great many anomalies, such as internal high-resistivity barriers in some samples of germanium. The most curious phenomenon was the exceptionally low resistance observed when voltage pulses were applied. This effect remained a mystery because nobody realised, until 1948, that Bray had observed minority carrier injection - the effect that was identified by William Shockley at Bell Labs and made the transistor a reality.

Bray wrote: "That was the one aspect that we missed, but even had we understood the idea of minority carrier injection...we would have said, 'Oh, this explains our effects.' We might not necessarily have gone ahead and said, 'Let's start making transistors', open up a factory and sell them... At that time the important device was the high back voltage rectifier".

Origin of the term

Bell Telephone Laboratories needed a generic name for the new invention: "Semiconductor Triode", "Solid Triode", "Surface States Triode", "Crystal Triode" and "Iotatron" were all considered, but "transistor," coined by John R. Pierce, won an internal ballot. The rationale for the name is described in the following extract from the company's Technical Memorandum calling for votes:
Pierce recalled the naming somewhat differently:
The Nobel Foundation states that the term is a combination of the words "transfer" and "resistor

Resistor

A linear resistor is a linear, passive two-terminal electrical component that implements electrical resistance as a circuit element.The current through a resistor is in direct proportion to the voltage across the resistor's terminals. Thus, the ratio of the voltage applied across a resistor's...

" - Nobelprize.org - The Transistor

Production and commercialization

By 1953, the transistor was being used in some products, such as hearing aid

Hearing aid

A hearing aid is an electroacoustic device which typically fits in or behind the wearer's ear, and is designed to amplify and modulate sound for the wearer. Earlier devices, known as "ear trumpets" or "ear horns", were passive funnel-like amplification cones designed to gather sound energy and...

s and telephone exchange

Telephone exchange

In the field of telecommunications, a telephone exchange or telephone switch is a system of electronic components that connects telephone calls...

s, but there were still significant issues preventing its broader application, such as sensitivity to moisture and the fragility of the wires attached to germanium crystals. Donald G. Fink

Donald G. Fink

Donald Glen Fink was an American electrical engineer, a pioneer in the development of radio navigation systems and television standards, vice president for research of Philco, president of the Institute of Radio Engineers, General Manager of the IEEE, and an editor of many important publications...

, Philco

Philco

Philco, the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company , was a pioneer in early battery, radio, and television production as well as former employer of Philo Farnsworth, inventor of cathode ray tube television...

's director of research, summarized the status of the transistor's commercial potential with an analogy: "Is it a pimpled adolescent, now awkward, but promising future vigor? Or has it arrived at maturity, full of languor, surrounded by disappointments?"

Transistor radios

Bell immediately put the point-contact transistor into limited production at Western Electric

Western Electric

Western Electric Company was an American electrical engineering company, the manufacturing arm of AT&T from 1881 to 1995. It was the scene of a number of technological innovations and also some seminal developments in industrial management...

in Allentown, Pennsylvania

Allentown, Pennsylvania

Allentown is a city located in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, in the United States. It is Pennsylvania's third most populous city, after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and the 215th largest city in the United States. As of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 118,032 and is currently...

. Prototypes of all-transistor AM radio receivers were demonstrated, but were really only laboratory curiosities. However, in 1950 Shockley developed a radically different type of solid-state amplifier which became known as the Bipolar Junction

Bipolar junction transistor

|- align = "center"| || PNP|- align = "center"| || NPNA bipolar transistor is a three-terminal electronic device constructed of doped semiconductor material and may be used in amplifying or switching applications. Bipolar transistors are so named because their operation involves both electrons...

"transistor". Although it works on a completely different principle to the point-contact "transistor"

Point-contact transistor

A point-contact transistor was the first type of solid-state electronic transistor ever constructed. It was made by researchers John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain at Bell Laboratories in December 1947. They worked in a group led by physicist William Bradford Shockley...

, this is the device which is most commonly referred to as simply a "transistor" today. Morgan Sparks

Morgan Sparks

Morgan Sparks was an American scientist and engineer who helped develop the microwatt bipolar junction transistor in 1951, which was a critical step in making transistors usable for every-day electronics...

made the bipolar junction transistor into a practical device. These were also licensed to a number of other electronics companies, including Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments Inc. , widely known as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, United States, which develops and commercializes semiconductor and computer technology...

, who produced a limited run of transistor radio

Transistor radio

A transistor radio is a small portable radio receiver using transistor-based circuitry. Following their development in 1954 they became the most popular electronic communication device in history, with billions manufactured during the 1960s and 1970s...

s as a sales tool. Early transistors were chemically unstable and only suitable for low-power, low-frequency applications, but as transistor design developed, these problems were slowly overcome.

There are numerous claimants to the title of the first company to produce practical transistor radios. Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments Inc. , widely known as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, United States, which develops and commercializes semiconductor and computer technology...

had demonstrated all-transistor AM radios as early as 1952, but their performance was well below that of equivalent battery tube models. A workable all-transistor radio

Transistor radio

was demonstrated in August 1953 at the Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...

Radio Fair by the German firm Intermetall. It was built with four of Intermetall's hand-made transistors, based upon the 1948 invention of Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker.
However, as with the early Texas units (and others) only prototypes were ever built; it was never put into commercial production.

The production of the first commercially successful transistor radio is often incorrectly attributed to Sony

Sony

, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....

(originally Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo). However the Regency TR-1

Regency TR-1

The Regency TR-1 was the first commercially sold transistor radio.-History:Two companies working together, Texas Instruments of Dallas, Texas and Industrial Development Engineering Associates of Indianapolis, Indiana, were behind the unveiling of the Regency TR-1, the world's first...

, made by the Regency Division of I.D.E.A. (Industrial Development Engineering Associates) of Indianapolis, Indiana, was the first practical transistor radio made in any significant numbers. The TR-1 was announced on October 18, 1954 and put on sale in November 1954 for $49.95 (the equivalent of about $361 in year-2005 dollars) and sold about 150,000 units.

The TR-1 used four Texas NPN transistors and had to be powered by a 22.5 Volt battery, since the only way to get adequate radio frequency

Radio frequency

Radio frequency is a rate of oscillation in the range of about 3 kHz to 300 GHz, which corresponds to the frequency of radio waves, and the alternating currents which carry radio signals...

performance out of early transistors was to run them close to their collector-to-emitter breakdown voltage. This made the TR-1 very expensive to run, and it was far more popular for its novelty or status value that its actual performance, rather in the fashion of the first MP3 players.

Still, aside from its indifferent performance, the TR-1 was a very advanced product for its time, using printed circuit board

Printed circuit board

A printed circuit board, or PCB, is used to mechanically support and electrically connect electronic components using conductive pathways, tracks or signal traces etched from copper sheets laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. It is also referred to as printed wiring board or etched wiring...

s, and what were then considered micro-miniature components.

Masaru Ibuka

Masaru Ibuka

Masaru Ibuka was a Japanese electronics industrialist. He co-founded what is now Sony....

, co-founder of the Japanese firm Sony

Sony

, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....

, was visiting the USA when Bell Labs announced the availability of manufacturing licenses, including detailed instructions on how to manufacture junction transistors. Ibuka obtained special permission from the Japanese Ministry of Finance to pay the $50,000 license fee, and in 1955 the company introduced their own five-transistor "pocket" radio, the TR-55, under the new brand name Sony

Sony

, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....

. (The term "pocket" was a matter of some interpretation, as Sony allegedly had special shirts made with oversized pockets for their salesmen) This product was soon followed by more ambitious designs, but it is generally regarded as marking the commencement of Sony's growth into a manufacturing superpower.

The TR-55 was quite similar to the Regency TR-1 in many ways, being powered by the same sort of 22.5Volt battery, and was not much more practical. Very few were sold in the USA. It was not until 1957 that Sony produced their ground-breaking "TR-7" 7-transistor portable, a much more advanced design that ran on three ordinary flashlight cells and could compete favorably with vacuum tube portables. However, by this time similar designs were being produced in most industrialized countries.

Computers

The world’s first transistor computer

Transistor computer

A transistor computer is a computer which uses discrete transistors instead of vacuum tubes. The "first generation" of electronic computers used vacuum tubes, which generated large amounts of heat, were bulky, and were unreliable. A "second generation" of computers, through the late 1950s and...

was built at the University of Manchester in Nov. 1953. The computer was built by Dick Grimsdale, then a research student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and now a Professor of Electronic Engineering at Sussex University.

The machine used point-contact transistors, made in small quantities by STC and Mullard. These consisted of a single crystal of germanium with two fine wires, resembling the crystal and cat’s whisker of the 1920s. These transistors had the useful property that a single transistor could possess two stable states. The memory was a magnetic drum, a cylindrical version of today’s hard disk drives. The arithmetic and control registers were on the drum, in the form of delay lines with reading heads displaced a short distance from the writing heads around the circumference. The development of the machine was severely hampered by the unreliability of the transistors, which consumed 150 watts.
The CDC 1604

CDC 1604

The CDC 1604 was a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation. The 1604 is known as the first commercially successful transistorized computer. Legend has it that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDC's first street address to...

was the first practical commercial computer based on transistors.

Improvements in transistor design

Shockley was upset about the device being credited to Brattain and Bardeen, whom he felt had built it "behind his back" to take the glory. Matters became worse when Bell Labs lawyers found that some of Shockley's own writings on the transistor were close enough to those of an earlier 1925 patent by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld

Julius Edgar Lilienfeld

Julius Edgar Lilienfeld was an Austro-Hungarian physicist. He was born in Lemberg in Austria-Hungary , moved to the United States in the early 1920s, and became American citizen in 1934...

that they thought it best that his name be left off the patent application.

Shockley was incensed, and decided to demonstrate who was the real brains of the operation. Only a few months later he invented an entirely new type of transistor with a layer or "sandwich" structure. This new form was considerably more robust than the fragile point-contact system, and would go on to be used for the vast majority of all transistors into the 1960s. It would evolve into the bipolar junction transistor

Bipolar junction transistor

.

The spacistor

Spacistor

The spacistor was a type of transistor developed in the 1950s as an improvement over the point-contact transistor and the later alloy junction transistor. It offered much higher speed than earlier transistors....

was a type of transistor

Transistor

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. It is composed of a semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current...

developed in the 1950s

1950s

The 1950s or The Fifties was the decade that began on January 1, 1950 and ended on December 31, 1959. The decade was the sixth decade of the 20th century...

as an improvement over the point-contact transistor

Point-contact transistor

and the later alloy junction transistor. Further developments included the grown-junction transistor

Grown-junction transistor

The grown-junction transistor was the first type of bipolar junction transistor made. It was invented by William Shockley at Bell Labs on June 23, 1948. The patent was filed on June 26, 1948. The first germanium prototypes were made in 1949...

(1951), the surface barrier transistor, the diffusion transistor, the mesa transistor (Fairchild 1957), the tetrode transistor

Tetrode transistor

-Early tetrode transistors:There were two types of tetrode transistor developed in the early 1950s as an improvement over the point-contact transistor and the later grown junction transistor and alloy junction transistor. Both offered much higher speed than earlier transistors.*Point-contact...

, and the pentode transistor

Pentode transistor

-Early pentode transistors:One early pentode transistor was developed in the early 1950s as an improvement over the point-contact transistor.*A point-contact transistor having three emitters...

.

With the fragility problems solved, a remaining problem was purity. Making germanium

Germanium

of the required purity was proving to be a serious problem, and limited the number of transistors that actually worked from a given batch of material. Germanium's sensitivity to temperature also limited its usefulness. Scientists theorized that silicon would be easier to fabricate, but few bothered to investigate this possibility. Morris Tanenbaum et al. at Bell Laboratories (Jl. of Applied Physics, 26, 686-692, 1955) were the first to develop a working silicon transistor in January 1954. A few months later, Gordon Teal, working independently at the nascent Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments Inc. , widely known as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, United States, which develops and commercializes semiconductor and computer technology...

(not published), developed a similar device. Both of these devices were made by controlling the doping of silicon single crystals while they were grown from molten silicon. A far superior method was developed by Morris Tanenbaum and Calvin S. Fuller at Bell Laboratories (Bell System Technical J., 35, 1-34, 1955) in early 1955 by the gaseous diffusion of donor and acceptor impurities into single crystal silicon chips. That technology was later used by Jack Kilby

Jack Kilby

Jack St. Clair Kilby was an American physicist who took part in the invention of the integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments in 1958. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2000. He is credited with the invention of the integrated circuit or microchip...

and Robert Noyce

Robert Noyce

Robert Norton Noyce , nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel in 1968...

in their invention of integrated circuit

Integrated circuit

An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...

ry, thereby initiating the "Silicon Age". Germanium disappeared from most transistors by the late 1960s.

Within a few years, transistor-based products, most notably radios, were appearing on the market. A major improvement in manufacturing yield came when a chemist advised the companies fabricating semiconductors to use distilled water

Distilled water

Distilled water is water that has many of its impurities removed through distillation. Distillation involves boiling the water and then condensing the steam into a clean container.-History:...

rather than tap water: calcium

Calcium

Calcium is the chemical element with the symbol Ca and atomic number 20. It has an atomic mass of 40.078 amu. Calcium is a soft gray alkaline earth metal, and is the fifth-most-abundant element by mass in the Earth's crust...

ion

Ion

An ion is an atom or molecule in which the total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons, giving it a net positive or negative electrical charge. The name was given by physicist Michael Faraday for the substances that allow a current to pass between electrodes in a...

s were the cause of the poor yields. "Zone melting

Zone melting

Zone melting is a group of similar methods of purifying crystals, in which a narrow region of a crystal is molten, and this molten zone is moved along the crystal...

", a technique using a moving band of molten material through the crystal, further increased the purity of the available crystals.

The first gallium-arsenide Schottky-gate field-effect transistor (MESFET

MESFET

MESFET stands for metal semiconductor field effect transistor. It is quite similar to a JFET in construction and terminology. The difference is that instead of using a p-n junction for a gate, a Schottky junction is used...

) was made by Carver Mead

Carver Mead

Carver Andress Mead is a US computer scientist. He currently holds the position of Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology , having taught there for over 40 years.Mead studied electrical engineering at Caltech, getting...

and reported in 1966.

Books and literature

The invention of the transistor & the birth of the information age

Out of the Crystal Maze Chapters from The History of Solid State Physics (728s)
Electronic Genie: THE TANGLED HISTORY OF SILICON (304s)
The INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD: HOW A SMALL GROUP OF RADAR PIONEERS WON THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND LAUNCHED A TECH (576s)

External links

The Bell Systems Memorial on Transistors.
IEEE Global History Network, The Transistor and Portable Electronics. All about the history of transistors and integrated circuits.
Transistorized. Historical and technical information from the Public Broadcasting Service
Public Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
This Month in Physics History: November 17 to December 23, 1947: Invention of the First Transistor. From the American Physical Society
American Physical Society
The American Physical Society is the world's second largest organization of physicists, behind the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. The Society publishes more than a dozen scientific journals, including the world renowned Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, and organizes more than 20...
50 Years of the Transistor. From Science Friday, December 12, 1997
The transistor: 60 years old and still switching EEtimes article
John Markoff: „Herbert F. Mataré. An inventor of the transistor has his moment.“ New York Times 24. February 2003
Michael Riordan: „How Europe Missed The Transistor“ IEEE Spectrum Vol. 42, issue 11 S. 52 - 57 November 2005 Van Dormael: The French Transistor (DOI)
Mark P D Burgess (2008), Semiconductor History: Faraday to Shockley.

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