With Transistor, They Sparked a Revolution

In the summer of 1948, a tiny electronic device called a transistor--the size of a pencil eraser--was presented to the world at a press conference at the headquarters of Bell Laboratories in New York City.

It wasn’t much of a press conference and it failed to create a buzz over this invention. Even the hometown paper, the New York Times, managed only a few paragraphs on the event in a column about radio news, giving top billing that day to the radio show “Our Miss Brooks.”

Who could have guessed that this invention would trigger a technological revolution that would become one of the most sweeping in history?

From its creation in 1947 by John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain and William Shockley of Bell Labs a few months before the press conference, the transistor and its direct descendant, the integrated circuit, have brought about a stunning transformation of society.

Bardeen, a quiet, thoughtful scientist, and the ever-jovial Brattain had done almost all the work developing the transistor. Shockley, their overbearing and arrogant boss, had seized most of the credit.

But from that volatile mix sprang a unique invention that eventually turned room-sized computers into hand-held devices, and hulking furniture-sized living room radios into transistor radios, the first of an unceasing flood of portable electronic devices for consumers.

The transistor and the integrated circuit created whole new industries by packing electronic components onto a single silicon chip the size of a fingernail. The versatility and tiny size of the devices opened the way to the exploration of space and the construction of compact digital computers, mobile phones and even Nintendo.

This technology has powered the great global postwar boom, lifting Japan out of the ashes of World War II, turning a once unheralded swath of California, eventually named Silicon Valley, into the center of the computing world and hoisting the U.S. into a position of economic dominance. Along the way, the devices created so many ripples through society that it is hard to say what has not been affected by them.

“The transistor is right up there [as] the single most important invention of our century,” said futurist Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future, a Menlo Park, Calif., consulting firm that studies long-term trends in information technology. “It has made the information revolution possible.”

That so much could spring from a device with such modest origins is one of the quirks of technological history. The transistor was developed to be a rugged, miniaturized replacement for the vacuum tube, a device developed around the turn of century that acted as a valve for electricity, allowing engineers to guide, amplify, shape and switch the flow of electrons.

The vacuum tube was a wonderfully versatile device, able to amplify radio signals, convert electrical power into different forms and switch on and off at high speed--a crucial ability for the development of computers. Unfortunately, the vacuum tube was also hot, bulky, power-hungry and temperamental in the extreme.

Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, of Bell Labs, believed that a class of materials known as “semiconductors”--substances such as germanium and silicon that can both conduct or inhibit the flow of electricity--could be used as a replacement for vacuum tubes.

By touching a wire to a piece of germanium with slight impurities in it, the trio found they could control how well the material conducted electricity. They named their invention the “transistor,” a word derived from the semiconductor’s ability to amplify electrical signals that were transferred through it. The three scientists won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery.

Shockley eventually became disenchanted with Bell Labs, where his reputation for being overbearing and overly competitive prevented him from being promoted, according to the book “Crystal Fire,” which details the discovery of the transistor.

Shockley struck out on his own in 1955, forming the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Palo Alto, where he had spent most of his childhood. His lab was the first semiconductor company in what would become Silicon Valley. He recruited the best and the brightest. Among his first employees were Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, who went on to co-found Intel Corp. in 1968.

The first products that used the new transistors--about 1/200th the size of vacuum tubes--were exotic devices such as hearing aids and military equipment. But the introduction of the first pocket-sized transistor radios in 1954 for $49.95 launched the device into the mainstream. Soon, transistors were replacing vacuum tubes in everything from computers to TVs.

But it became clear by the mid-1950s that the transistor alone was not a complete solution to the problems of miniaturization. Each transistor had two or more wires coming out of it, which had to be painstakingly soldered to a circuit board by hand.

The solution was separately conceived of in late 1958 and early 1959 by Jack S. Kilby of Texas Instruments and Noyce. By then Noyce, with Moore, had left Shockley’s company because of his erratic behavior to create a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor.

Kilby was a 6-foot-6 Midwesterner who had served in Burma as an OSS radio technician during World War II. Friends described him as reserved and modest, but a born tinkerer who was always searching for problems to solve.

Noyce, the son of an Iowa minister, was an affable and confident physicist who had emerged among Shockley’s original group of young researchers as a natural leader.

Their idea was to construct the various components of a circuit--transistors, resistors and capacitors--on a single piece of silicon called an “integrated circuit.” Kilby built the first device in 1958, but it was Noyce who came up with an inexpensive and efficient method to make the devices in 1959.

These integrated circuits combined the power of transistors to control the flow of electricity with the means to pack thousands--and ultimately, millions--of components onto a tiny silicon chip.

William J. Kaiser, chairman of the electrical engineering department at UCLA, said that just a few decades ago, even the most complex electronic devices had only a few hundred components. Today, Intel’s Pentium III microprocessor packs 9.5 million transistors on a chip.

“Complexity became a possibility,” Kaiser said.

Portable, battery-powered devices became possible for the first time, leading to a wide range of products from cardiac pacemakers to hand-held calculators and PCs.

Joseph Schulman is the chief scientist for the Alfred E. Mann Foundation in Valencia, a developer of medical electronic devices. He said the earliest pacemakers from 1958 had only two transistors and were the size of hockey pucks. Today, the most advanced pacemakers are about the size of a silver dollar and almost as thin. Inside are up to a million transistors that allow the device to control the heart in a nearly natural manner.

“This is just something you couldn’t make with vacuum tubes,” Schulman said.

Transistors and silicon chips became the enablers of a revolution in production, in much the same way that standardized nuts and bolts launched the era of mass production, said Hal Varian, dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley. These electronic pieces, which cost less than real nuts and bolts, could be mixed to produce wondrously different devices. Essentially, the same chips with different programming could be used in computers, digital cameras and air conditioners.

Silicon Valley also spawned a burst of new millionaires, but among the original inventors of the transistor and integrated circuit, only Noyce and Moore struck it rich as co-founders of Intel.

Shockley’s company never made a profit and in the 1960s he joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he became a controversial figure for his outspoken view that intelligence was determined by race. Shockley died in 1989.

Brattain retired from Bell Labs in 1967 and died in 1987. Bardeen later became a professor of physics at the University of Illinois, turned his attention to superconductivity and in 1972 became the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in physics.

Kilby left Texas Instruments in 1970 to pursue his own inventions. He still lives in Dallas and has more than 60 patents in his name, including the hand-held calculator.

“I never imagined it would have this impact,” Kilby said of the integrated circuit. “I thought it could be important for electronics, but what I didn’t realize was how the price decreases would expand the field. It’s just been amazing.”

Prices, in fact, plummeted, sometimes to mere fractions of a penny. The phenomena was first noted by Gordon Moore, who wrote in 1965 that the price of integrated circuits appeared to drop by half every year while the number of transistors on a silicon chip seemed to double every year. Intel’s chips have been a benchmark of “Moore’s Law.” In 1995, Intel’s top of the line Pentium processor sold for almost $700. Today, that same chip sells for less than $40.

All these factors have given the consumer an unprecedented power to communicate and compute on their own, which in turn has forged new types of social and business connections. Saffo said the problems of distance and geography that hindered the old world have begun to be erased by the new age of portable and ubiquitous communications.

He said that perhaps the best sign of the success of the transistor and integrated circuit is how invisible they have become, despite being used in every facet of life.

“It is the enabler of the technology of our times,” Saffo said. “It is truly invisible technology”