Bell Labs begins studying a transistor

On this day in 1947 John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain at AT&T’s Bell Labs started their observations of the basic principles of the transistor. Nearly every electronic device produced from the 1960s onwards relies on the principles that they discovered. Their initial research lasted from 17 November to 23 December. They noticed that when two gold point contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, a signal was produced with the output power greater than the input. A replica of their experiment is in the pictures below. Their group’s leader William Shockley saw the potential in this, and over the next few months worked to greatly expand the knowledge of semiconductors. The term transistor was coined by John R. Pierce as a contraction of the term transresistance. What they had invented was the first point-contact transistor. All three (seen in the picture below) were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics “for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.” You can read more about it in this Physics Today article on Bardeen from 1992 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.88133), that will be free for the next week.

Date in History: 17 November 1947