TECHNOLOGY WATCH : Mr. Transistor

John Bardeen said he knew that the transistor he helped invent at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1947 was important, but he had no idea then just how important.

Bardeen, who died last week in Boston, saw the device he helped create literally change the world.

The average digital computer depends on thousands of transistors to regulate the flow of electricity as it retrieves data from its memory disk. Pacemakers use them to regulate heartbeat, satellites to send sound and picture around the world. They are in hearing aids, guided missiles and radios. Without transistors, there would be no Walkman, let alone a Sony Corp.

The three members of the transistor team--Bardeen, William P. Shockley and Walter H. Brattain--shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery.

But he was prouder of another achievement, working out a theory that led to superconductivity--electricity traveling with little or no resistance at low temperatures. Among its applications are magnetic imagers used in diagnosing illness and supercomputers.

For that work, he shared a second Nobel Price in Physics in 1972 with two of his graduate students, Leon Cooper, now at Brown University, and J. Robert Schrieffer, now at UC Santa Barbara.

The reason he was so proud of his superconductivity work, he once said, is that it took a lot more effort than the transistor project, requiring a higher order of new concepts. With that insight, he may also have discovered why so few people really do change the world.