First Transistor Built: Electronics Revolution Born
Three men hunched over a workbench at Bell Labs, pressing two gold contacts onto a sliver of germanium less than two inches long. The amplified signal came through. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain had cracked it—vacuum tubes replaced by something solid, tiny, and stable. Their boss William Shockley, furious he wasn't in the room for the breakthrough, went home and invented a better version in four weeks. They split the Nobel Prize anyway. That germanium point-contact transistor, fragile and finicky, lasted commercially about five years. But the idea—controlling electrons through solid materials instead of glass tubes—put computers in our pockets. Every smartphone now holds billions of descendants from that December afternoon.
December 16, 1947
79 years ago
Key Figures & Places
What Else Happened on December 16
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