June 30, 1948 - A Day on which the world changed


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Exactly 62 years ago, on June 30, 1948 Bell Telephone Laboratory announced the creation and release of a radical new technology, the field effect transistor. In fact it was the first time the public heard the word transistor. The device was developed by a team at Bell Labs headed by Robert Shockley but the scientific breakthrough was accomplished by two physicists Bardeen and Brittain, who applied the quantum theory of semi-conducts to produce an amplifier that required very little energy to operate. Once the problems of reliability had been solved, miniature low energy electron flows could be managed.

It is very hard for many of you young folks to realize just how crude electrical devices were prior to the transistor. The only devices for regulating electron flow was the vacuum tube which was a hot energy eating device very little different from an incandescent light bulb. Telephone switching equipment was positively late stage Victorian technology with racks and racks of slow moving, energy chomping rotating electro-mechanical relay switches, very little different than the electromagnets that Samuel Morse used in his telegraph in 1843.

Radios and early model T.V. sets were energy eating, blazing hot devices and electromagnetic fields required millions of times as much energy to produce as they do now.

Sixty two years and the technology is like something from the Far Future compared to what it was then.

I was just a kid at the time, twelve years old, barely post pubescent and I lived in a world in which there were no really high speed, low energy compact computers. Programmable computers at that time were vacuum tube controlled monsters as they would be for another ten years (major league transistor computers come out in the middle fifties). There were no pocket calculators and accountants used gear grinding clanking desk calculators that would not have looked out of place in Victorian England eighty years prior.

Times they are a-changin'

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Exactly 62 years ago, on June 30, 1948 Bell Telephone Laboratory announced the creation and release of a radical new technology, the field effect transistor. In fact it was the first time the public heard the word transistor. The device was developed by a team at Bell Labs headed by Robert Shockley but the scientific breakthrough was accomplished by two physicists Bardeen and Brittain, who applied the quantum theory of semi-conducts to produce an amplifier that required very little energy to operate. Once the problems of reliability had been solved, miniature low energy electron flows could be managed.

It's William Bradford Shockley, Bob, or "Bill."

My parents knew the Shockleys in the late 1930s. He took my sister and his daughter camping and canoeing in upstate NY. I have a picture of him paddling.

My Father always said Shockley was the real inventor of the transistor, but my Mother who knew his wife who in turn knew the other wives told me it was the other guys who had the most to do with it. This was common knowledge within that group. Both my Father and Shockley had a tremendous amount of brains, but in terms of IQ Dad wiped the floor with him. My Mother had access to all the parents IQ scores at the pre-school in NYC they used and his was only in the mid to low 130s. This is ironic because of all the emphasis he put on IQ later in life for which he made himself notorious. However, I watched him on TV around 40 years ago and it was obvious he was stupendously smart and whatever his IQ really was he was a genius. (He elsewhere described himself as a genius of the second order.) My Father might have been, but he was into literature and philosophy--that kind of thing--not math and science and after an explosion of creativity in college he effectively threw it away. Both men had a strong if not exactly the same obnoxious streak and were probably unbalanced by all their brainpower. These were not very likable people, but they liked each other. They had little congress after the 1930s.

--Brant

Edited by Brant Gaede
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I think in the next decade or so solid state lighting will get rid of some the last vestages of 19th century electric technology: the light bulb. In a way, that'll kind of complete this revolution. Or so I predict. rolleyes.gif

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