Transistor Concept.

If cells are the building blocks of life, transistors are

the building blocks of the digital revolution.
Without transistors, the technological wonders you
use every day -- cell phones, computers, cars -would be vastly different, if they existed at all.
Before transistors, product engineers used vacuum
tubes and electromechanical switches to complete
electrical circuits. Tubes were far from ideal. They
had to warm up before they worked (and
sometimes overheated when they did), they were
unreliable and bulky and they used too much
energy. Everything from televisions, to telephone
systems, to early computers used these
components, but in the years after World War II,
scientists were looking for alternatives to vacuum
tubes. They'd soon find their answer from work
done decades earlier.
In the late 1920's, Polish American physicist Julius
Lilienfeld filed patents for a three-electrode device
made from copper sulfide. There's no evidence that
he actually created the component, but his
research helped develop what today is a field effect
transistor, the building block of silicon chips.

Twenty years after Lilienfeld filed his patents,

scientists were trying to put his ideas to practical
use. The Bell Telephone System, in particular,
needed something better than vacuum tubes to
keep its communications systems working. The
company assembled what amounted to an all-star
team of scientific minds, including John Bardeen,
Walter Brattain and William Shockley, and put them
to work researching vacuum tube substitutes.
In 1947, Shockley was director of transistor
research at Bell Telephone Labs. Brattain was an
authority on solid-state physics as well as expert
on nature of atomic structure of solids and Bardeen
was an electrical engineer and physicist. Within a
year, Bardeen and Brittain used the element
germanium to create an amplifying circuit, also
called a point-contact transistor. Soon afterward,
Shockley improved on their idea by developing a
junction transistor.
The next year, Bell Labs announced to the world
that it had invented working transistors. The
original patent name for the first transistor went by
this description: Semiconductor amplifier; threeelectrode circuit element utilizing semi conductive
materials. It was an innocuous-sounding phrase.

But this invention netted the Bell team the 1956

Nobel Prize for Physics, and allowed scientists and
product engineers far greater control over the flow
of electricity.
It's no exaggeration that transistors have enabled
some of humankind's biggest leaps in technology.
Keep reading to see exactly how transistors work,
how they altered the course of technology, and in
the process, human history, too.