Sun 16 Dec 2007
“Sixty years ago, on Dec. 16, 1947, three physicists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., built the world’s first transistor. William Shockley, John Bardeen and [Walter] Brattain had been looking for a semiconductor amplifier to take the place of the vacuum tubes that made radios and other electronics so impossibly bulky, hot and power hungry. They were so instantly certain they’d found their answer that they didn’t speak a word of it to anyone for six months, until they could experiment further and apply for patents.”(1)
“The invention got little attention at the time, either in the popular press or in industry. But Shockley saw its potential. He left Bell Labs to found Shockley Semiconductor in Palo Alto, California. He hired superb engineers and physicists, but, according to physical chemist Harry Sello, Shockley’s personality drove out eight of his best and brightest. Those “traitorous eight” founded a new company called Fairchild Semiconductor. Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, two of the eight, went on to form Intel Corporation. They (and others at Texas Instruments) co-invented the integrated circuit. Today, Intel produces billions of transistors daily on its integrated circuits, yet Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley earned very little money from their research. Nonetheless, Shockley’s company was the beginning of Silicon Valley. Bardeen left Bell Labs for the University of Illinois, where he won a second Nobel Prize. Brattain stayed on for several years, and then left to teach. Shockley lost his company and taught at Stanford for a while, and then got involved in a notorious controversy over race, genetics and intelligence that destroyed his reputation.”(2)
“Shockley believed that the higher rate of reproduction among the less intelligent was having what he called a “dysgenic” effect, causing a lowering of worldwide human quality. Although Shockley was concerned about both Black and White dysgenic effects, he found the situation among Blacks more disastrous. … Shockley reasoned that because intelligence (like most traits) is inherited, the Black population would, over time become much less intelligent countering all the gains that had been made by the Civil Rights movement. … Shockley also proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization.” (3)
John Bardeen is the only person to have won two Nobel Prizes in Physics:(4)
Read More about transistors at PBS
I remember receiving a Radio Shack electronic kit for Christmas when I was 12 or 13. It had 101 experiments, many involving the 2n2222 transistor. The experiment manual pages quickly became dog-eared as I wired and rewired those fascinating labs (radios, sound generators, security systems,etc.) It was the magic of that kit, coupled with encouragement from my junior high school teachers which led me to pursue my degree in electrical and computer engineering at BYU. Thanks for that kit, Mom and Dad!