If you trace the development of the tools of the Information Age – computers, televisions, portable radios, and wireless telephones – back to a single event, you'll end up at December 23, 1947. That was the day a Bell Labs team led by William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen unveiled a revolutionary signal regulator called a transistor.
Before the development of the transistor, electronic devices relied on bulky components to switch and amplify electric signals. Calculators and typewriters were mechanical or electromechanical devices the size of small suitcases. Telephone equipment used bulky, temperamental mechanical relays. Radios and televisions had fragile glass vacuum tubes. And the computer? The old ENIAC, the first digital computer, had 18,000 vacuum tubes (the heat and light from the tubes attracted moths, thus the source of the term computer "bug"). The ENIAC filled a whole room.
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Transistor inventors John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics. (Lucent Technologies/Bell Lab)
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The Bell Labs team had set out to find a less bulky way to amplify sound traveling over telephone lines. Back then Bell Labs was still part of AT&T (the old American Telephone & Telegraph). It was Bell Labs engineer and part-time sci-fi writer John Pierce who coined the term "transistor," a combination of "trans-resistance" and the "istor" suffix common in other component names, such as resistor. Bell Labs became part of Lucent Technologies when that company was spun off from AT&T in 1996.
In 1952 and 1953 Bell Labs licensed its transistor technology to companies such as General Electric, IBM, Texas Instruments, and Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, the forerunner of Sony Electronics. The pocket-sized transistor radio, made by Regency Electronics and Texas Instruments, hit the market in 1954 and became one of the best-selling retail products of all time. When Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering released their transistor radio soon after, they called it the Sony, from sonus, which is Latin for "sound." Of course, Sony eventually took that name. (Squeezed out of the market by Japanese competition, Regency evolved into two-way radio manufacturer Relm Wireless Corp.)
In 1956 Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen received the Nobel Prize in Physics. That year the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) built the first transistorized computer, and by 1959 IBM had brought a commercial model to market. The IBM 7000 had 2,000 transistors and was the size of a refrigerator. During that time the transistor also replaced the telephone's mechanical relay.
Realizing the transistor's potential, Shockley left Bell Labs to form Shockley Semiconductor, recruiting the field's top engineers and physicists. Many consider the founding of Shockley Semiconductor the beginning of Silicon Valley. The following year a group of Shockley workers – called the Traitorous Eight, the group included Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore – left to form Fairchild Semiconductor.
In 1958 Texas Instruments' Jack Kilby went the transistor one better, inventing the integrated circuit, with both resistors and capacitors engineered on the same piece of semiconducting material (germanium). The next year Fairchild's Noyce unveiled a commercial grade, silicon-based integrated circuit.
During the 1960s Japanese companies such as Sony developed ways to mass produce transistors quickly. Lots of electronics followed, including the transistorized calculator, which Sharp introduced in 1964. In 1968 Intel Corporation was formed by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, veterans of both Shockley Semiconductor and Fairchild Semiconductor. Texas Instruments gave us the pocket calculator in 1972.
Since then transistors have become simply components of an integrated circuit, and integrated circuits continue to be made smaller and faster – and to be engineered into more and more devices. Thanks to integrated circuits, worldwide use of PCs is approaching 400 million – that's a computer for every 15 persons. More than 150 million people are linked to the Internet. Embedded computers in the form of integrated circuits are even more ubiquitous: They're found in our appliances, cars, video games, and robotic toys. Even our bodies are becoming transistorized: Today more than a million Americans have pacemakers implanted (the device was invented by Medtronic in 1967).
Today a semiconductor can have several million transistors, and experimental chips have more than 100 million (Texas Instruments boasts they'll create a digital signal processor with 500 million transistors by 2010). And while in the early 1950s a single transistor could cost up to $45 to manufacture, today's multimillion-transistor chips cost from just a few dollars to a few hundred.
All those little chips add up to a worldwide semiconductor industry with sales of nearly $200 billion. But perhaps more important, they fuel the many industries – including computers, the Internet, telecommunications, entertainment, industrial and medical instrumentation, and robotic manufacturing, to name just a few – that have escorted us into the 21st century on a digital roll.
Joy Aiken is a writer for Hoover's Technology team.
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