50 Years Ago, Information Age Began in Bell Labs

Few knew it at the time, but when John Bardeen and Walter Brattain cranked up their crude device half a century ago, they were launching a revolution that would eventually touch every human life and reach every corner of the globe.

Under the domineering and egocentric hand of their team leader, William Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain had been working for two years on a secret project at Bell Telephone Laboratories when the brass was invited to witness the results Dec. 16, 1947.

Bell Labs, the world’s leading industrial research center at the time, desperately wanted to find something better than the bulky and power-hungry vacuum tube to amplify its electrical signals.

As the executives took turns putting on a set of earphones, Brattain’s normally soft voice boomed in their ears. The age of the transistor had begun.

It took years to perfect the device, but historians cite that event, on a cold winter day 50 years ago, as the beginning of the Information Age.

Normally, I hate writing “anniversary stories,” but this one is worthy of an exception, due partly to the publication of an outstanding book. In “Crystal Fire, the Birth of the Information Age” (W.W. Norton & Co., 1997), Michael Riordan, assistant to the director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and science historian Lillian Hoddeson of the University of Illinois tell the compelling story of the men and their invention.

It is as full of twists and turns and surprises as any Hollywood production.

World War II had finally drawn to an end, and the brilliant but caustic Shockley saw the opportunities at hand better than most scientists of his day. He recognized that the postwar era would bring new opportunities for industrial growth, and he returned to Bell Labs from his wartime post at the Pentagon with a zealous desire to lead that effort.

He assembled a team of crack researchers, including Brattain, a congenial physicist who had grown up on his father’s ranch in eastern Washington, and Bardeen, the son of scholarly parents who was already an esteemed theoretical physicist at the age of 39.

Shockley saw himself as the visionary, and he left much of the routine experimentation to his two leading physicists. So when they brought forth the fruits of their labors on that December day, it was their work, not his, that ushered in the age of the transistor.

Shockley never quite got over it. According to Riordan and Hoddeson, he proved a master at drawing attention to himself and slowly froze Brattain and Bardeen out of the picture. Much remained to be done to make the transistor reliable and suitable for mass production, and Shockley, according to the authors, deserves a lot of the credit for that.

Bardeen and Brattain, somewhat embittered, went on to other projects, and in 1956 the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to all three. But it is Shockley who is still regarded as the “father of the transistor.”

Meanwhile, new players came onto the field. An upstart company called Texas Instruments came out with the first portable transistor radio, a tinny box about the size of a pack of cigarettes that gave birth to the global village.

The firm had hoped to create a large consumer market for the radio, but soon gave up and relinquished the field to an unknown little outfit in Japan that called itself Sony Corp.

Shockley saw others getting rich out of the science he had helped create and wanted a piece of the action. Desperate to become a millionaire, he founded the Shockley Transistor Corp. in a converted Quonset hut near the campus of Stanford University.

He hired a brilliant team of researchers, but his ham-handed approach soon turned them against him. They split off to form new companies in the same area, and Silicon Valley was born.

Brattain ultimately retired from Bell Labs, returned to his native region and settled down in Walla Walla, Wash., where he thought from time to time about using his rifle to blast the transistor radios, held to the ears of teenagers, which belched out what he considered the obnoxious noise of rock ‘n’ roll.

He died in 1987 at the age of 85 after a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease.

Despite his brilliance as a theoretical physicist, Bardeen said years later that he was slow to recognize the immense potential of the device he helped create. He went on to distinguish himself in the field of superconductivity, and in 1972 became the only person to win a second Nobel Prize in physics. He died in 1991 at the age of 82.

Shockley’s later years took a very curious turn. He joined Stanford University, where he turned his attention to the study of scientific creativity.

He struck a disastrous chord when he began to argue that there is a causal relationship between race and intelligence. In numerous speeches he argued that blacks were genetically inferior to whites in intelligence.

The claims brought international scorn to Shockley, who seemed to relish the debate. His scientific colleagues avoided him, and he became a lightning rod during the racial confrontations of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

He died a lonely death in 1989 at the age of 79.

The three were among many who helped bring about an innovation that would forever change the world. Many others made discoveries along the way that either played a key part in the initial invention or paved the way for mass production of the transistor.

Today, a child can hold a palm-sized computer that has more power than the largest computers in the world just a few decades ago.

Not even Shockley could have imagined that in the winter of 1947.

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Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at leedye@compuserve.com