The transistor, three weeks after Christmas

Bardeen and Brattain demonstrated a point-contact transistor at Bell Labs on December 23, 1947, with Shockley's team driving the solid-state program.

Why it matters

A solid-state switch with no vacuum, no filament, no warm-up: reliability and shrinking at once. Every chip is an arrangement of these — the most manufactured object in human history.

People

John Bardeen · Walter Brattain · William Shockley

Threads

This event sits on Computation and Energy.

Related events

• 1958 – 1959

  The integrated circuit

  Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild independently put multiple transistors onto single pieces of semiconductor.

  Computing · americas

• 1945

  ENIAC switches on

  The first general-purpose electronic computer filled a room, weighed 27 tons, and recalculated artillery tables in seconds instead of days.

  Computing · americas

• 1879 – 1882

  Edison lights the night

  Edison's Menlo Park lab delivered a practical incandescent lamp, then the Pearl Street station (1882) to power it — light sold as a service.

  Technology · americas

Sources

• Nobel Prize — The Transistor