Information / Electronics & Computing

Transistor

Bell Labs replaces the tube with a tiny semiconductor switch: small, frugal, cheap and the building block of all modern electronics.

In December 1947 John Bardeen and Walter Brattain built the first point-contact transistor at Bell Labs, and William Shockley developed the junction transistor in 1948; all three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. The foundation was the quantum physics of semiconductors. A transistor is a switch with no moving parts that can be packed by the billions onto a single chip.