[South Florida DX Association] The Transistor's Birthday

[Pete Rimmel - Marine Chemist - N8PR]

Copied from Forbes.com:

The Transistor's Birthday

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 William 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.

Then on June 30, 1948, they held a press conference in New York City. They
showed the world not only a big model of a transistor but also a TV and a
radio with transistors in place of the tubes. Nobody was talking about
anything like computers yet, but it was a first look at the future we all
live in. The world's response? The New York Times ran an item at the bottom
of its "News of Radio" column on page 46.

It sounded like a gimmick, and just too good to be true. The historian
Robert Friedel quotes a Bell Labs engineer as saying, "The transistor in
1949 didn't seem like anything very revolutionary to me. It just seemed like
another one of those crummy jobs that required one hell of a lot of overtime
and a lot of guff from my wife." Only 20% of them worked. They were hard to
manufacture. They required the design of new kinds of circuits. Even if they
could eventually, theoretically, replace the vacuum tube, the tube worked
well enough. How could they be worth the trouble?

But the technology kept improving. It got its first consumer application in
December 1952 in a hearing aid, where it replaced one of three tubes and
lowered battery costs. Then it took off. By 1954 the transistor was in 97%
of hearing aids and sales of the devices were up 50%. That year the first
transistor radio came out. It cost $49.95, the equivalent of $380 today.
Still, as of 1955, a total of just 4 million transistors had been
manufactured. That many vacuum tubes were produced every two days.

Revolutions can take time. We think of the information revolution as having
changed our world in an instant. But it took two later breakthroughs, each a
full decade apart, before the transistor could even begin its ascent to the
pinnacle of its capability--so far.

Between 1958 and 1959 two men working independently, Jack Kilby at Texas
Instruments (nyse: TXN - news - people ) and Robert Noyce at Fairchild
Semiconductor (nyse: FCS - news - people ), figured out how to combine a
sequence of transistors on a single wafer of silicon crystal. Now true
miniaturization and mass production would begin to be possible.

Then at the end of the 1960s the microprocessor, the computer on a chip, was
invented. It leapt another order-of-magnitude hurdle in the miniaturization
and interconnecting of transistors. It was put on the market by Intel
(nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) in 1971. That opened the floodgates--more
than 20 years after the birth of the transistor. Thanks to the
microprocessor, by the mid-1970s the idea of a personal computer, almost
undreamt of a few years before, was becoming familiar, even if very few
people had one yet.

Today a single advanced microprocessor can contain 1.7 billion transistors,
and the transistors can be as small as 200 billionths of a meter. The
numbers become dizzying. Gordon Moore, who quantified the effect of all
those devices with his Moore's Law, estimates that every year "we make on
the order of 1,017 transistors. That's a one followed by 17 zeros. ... We
make about one transistor for every ant on earth these days--every year."

There's something satisfying about being able to trace back that truly
ubiquitous, transformative technology, which we carry with us everywhere in
numerous places on, and sometimes inside, our bodies. It runs almost
everything in our lives that isn't strictly mechanical--to trace all that
back to three men in a research office in 1947. It would be even more
satisfying if those three men could have possibly envisioned what would grow
out of their work.

But that was no more possible than it is for us to see today what
nanotechnology and whatever grows out of it will bring us 60 years from now.
The only thing we can be sure of us is that the revolution isn't over. Hard
as it is to fathom, it's only just begun.