December 16, 1947: The Invention That Changed Everything
Zusammenfassung
The first transistor was demonstrated at Bell Labs on December 16, 1947, by Walter Brattain and John Bardeen, working under William Shockley. The device replaced the vacuum tube as an electronic switch and amplifier, enabling computers to shrink from room-filling machines to desktop devices and eventually to silicon chips with billions of components. Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics — but Shockley, who contributed least to the actual invention, received most of the credit. His subsequent behavior split the team that would have otherwise built the semiconductor industry at Bell Labs, and instead they founded Fairchild Semiconductor in Silicon Valley.
The Point Contact Transistor
The transistor that Brattain demonstrated on December 16 was a point-contact transistor: two gold foil contacts pressed against a germanium crystal, separated by only 50 micrometers, with a third terminal (the base) on the other side of the crystal. Applying a small voltage to one contact controlled a larger current through the other — amplification. Switching on and off could happen millions of times per second, compared to the thousands of times per second possible with vacuum tubes.
Bell Labs management arranged a formal demonstration on December 23, 1947, where the device amplified voice signals through a telephone circuit. The invention was kept secret until a patent could be filed, then announced publicly in June 1948.
The Three-Way Credit Problem
William Shockley ran the semiconductor research group at Bell Labs but was largely absent from the specific work that produced the point-contact transistor. Brattain and Bardeen developed the design over weeks of intensive experimental work while Shockley was traveling. When the breakthrough happened, Shockley was not present.
Shockley was furious. He felt he should have been the one to make the key discovery and immediately began developing his own transistor design — the junction transistor (1948), which was more manufacturable and became the standard. For the Nobel Prize (1956), the committee credited all three, but the public narrative — shaped partly by Shockley’s aggressive self-promotion — centered on Shockley.
The full story of the transistor, the Nobel Prize, and the personal dynamics at Bell Labs is covered in The Transistor and Bell Labs: The Idea Factory.
The Fairchild Consequence
Shockley left Bell Labs in 1955 to found Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California — near his mother’s home, and in a region with good weather that he felt would attract talent. He recruited eight of the best semiconductor engineers in the country.
Within two years, his management style — secretive, credit-hoarding, dismissive of his team — drove them to leave. The “Traitorous Eight” (as Shockley called them) co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 with backing from Sherman Fairchild. From Fairchild came Intel, AMD, and dozens of other semiconductor companies. The geographic cluster they created became Silicon Valley.
Shockley Semiconductor never produced a commercial product. Shockley spent his later years promoting theories about race and intelligence that destroyed his scientific reputation. The team he had recruited and whose work he had claimed built the most valuable industry in history. The story is central to Robert Noyce and Fairchild Semiconductor.