71st Anniversary of the Transistor

2018-12-21 | By John LeDuc

Last year we celebrated the 70th year of the transistor and so it’s time once again to recognize this revolutionary invention that changed the world!! It was December 23, 1947 when the first Transistor was made functional by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain—William Shockley was their boss. Shockley wanted to do one better and improve the “The Point Contact Transistor” that Bardeen & Brattain were given credit for. He had been wanting to make an amplifier better than the vacuum tube for many years prior and it really got to him that he did not create a working amplifier as John & Walter had done. Shockley was consumed with wanting to be the inventor of it and so he aggressively worked to immediately design something more reliable and easier to manufacture. In January 1948 a month after the discovery was shown to Shockley’s leaders, Shockley came up with the Junction Transistor which involved sandwiching N – P – N type semiconductor layers together. Although the “Point Contact Transistor” failed in being massively produced, Shockley’s Junction Transistor eventually won over after the patent was filed June 25th, 1948 and a functioning NPN transistor was demonstrated April 20th, 1950. Details on the history of the Transistor can be found here. For more information on the functional operation of Transistors see our article on Transistor Basics.

John Bardeen, left, William Shockley, middle (sitting), and Walter Brattain, right. (Reused with permission of Nokia Corporation and AT&T Archives)

The Point Contact Transistor (Reused with permission of Nokia Corporation and AT&T Archives)

Showing various package types of Transistors not shown in our Transistor Basics article.

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