1947: Transistor - The book of science

Transistor
Ubiquitous
Surface states
Commentary

William Shockley, Walter Houser Brattain, John Bardeen electromagnetism

Transistor

Thermionic triode vacuum tubes
rectified and amplified
but burned out quickly.
Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley
found that a semiconductor
with three contacts
could both rectify and amplify.
Because it transfers
a current across a resistor,
their boss called it a transistor.

Ubiquitous

Ubiquitous,
over sixty million
transistors are made
every year
for each person on Earth.
Transistor radios,
quartz watches,
displays, printers,
digital cameras,
pagers, cell phones,
GPS receivers,
music players,
gaming consoles,
computers, networks,
appliances, vehicles,
airplanes, weapons,
medical devices,
robots, and sensors
include transistors
and many of these devices
would not be possible
without them.

Surface states

A copper conductor carries a current
mainly on its surface. The surface states of a semiconductor
shield the material from penetration by an electric field.
These are my analogies, like a solution in search of a problem.
Therefore, I smile, wrinkle my forehead,
and basically don’t much care whether everyone understands me.
I’m not going to make it easy for anyone to get under my skin.

The first transistor was a point-contact, germanium crystal doped with “certain impurities.” Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen were not the first to propose a solid-state transistor, and German physicists independently invented the same thing only months after. John R. Pierce, who supervised Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley at Bell Labs, coined the term transistor in comparison to a property of the vacuum tube, transconductance.

In analog devices, transistors act as amplifiers. In digital electronic devices, transistors act as switches. The transistor can also act as a rectifier with a very low voltage drop.