New Amplifier
DOI: 10.1063/1.3066107
A semi‐conductor has been used for electronic amplification in the Bell Telephone Laboratories. For years the only flexible amplifier available, the vacuum tube, has been an important tool, not only in radio, telephony, and industrial control but in physical research as well. Now a fundamental study of certain problems of solid state physics has provided a new amplifier which seems suited for a variety of practical applications. Developed by John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain under a general research program initiated and directed by William Shockley, the Transistor, as it is called, is a semi‐conductor triode which can be used as an amplifier, an oscillator, and in other ways in which vacuum tubes perform.
