The first transistor was about half an inch high. That's mammoth by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology.

In What’s the point?: The Point Contact transistor I discussed Shockley’s white paper on the theory of the Point Contact Transistor. Let’s look further into this early transistor design. It is ...

The first commercially available transistors weren't much like the ones we use today. For one thing, they were big enough to actually see -- something the millions of transistors on a tiny computer ...

65 years ago, December 16th 1947, William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain operated the first ever working point-contact transistor, almost known as the iotatron. Now, so many years later, ...

NATURE ABHORS A vacuum tube," cracked Bell Labs physicist John Pierce. So did almost everyone else by the 1940s. Sure, vacuum tubes boosted the power of the phone network's electrical signals, which ...

In this lesson, students build two circuits and explore how transistors function. When Bell Labs introduced the transistor in June of 1948, a spokesman proudly announced "This cylindrical object . . .

The telephone company had problems with vacuum tubes, too, and hoped to find something else to use for switching telephone calls. The idea of somehow using semiconductors (solid materials such as ...

Sunday marks the 60th anniversary of the assembly of the very first transistor, invented at Bell Labs in 1947. That legendary company, along with semiconductor manufacturers such as Texas Instruments, ...

In his 1948 white paper 1, Shockley wrote, “The theory of the point-contact transistor is that the emitter point-contact introduces holes into the n-type base material. The collector point-contact, ...