Fact File: Who invented the Transistor? Invention: Transistor *** Date of Invention: 1947 *** Name of Inventors: John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley *** Nationality of Inventors: American *** Historical Period: WW2 (1939 - 1945) *** Category: Computing and Technology *** Country of Origin: American *** The Inventors and Invention of the Transistor ***

Fact 1: Who invented the Transistor? The Transistor was invented by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley in 1947 during the WW2 (1939 - 1945) era of inventions.

Fact 2: Who invented the Transistor? The invention was made possible due to the pioneering work in Electricity of Thomas Edison (1847 - 1931) who discovered the Electron on March 4, 1898 and Lee De Forest who invented the invented the thermionic valve, an electronic amplifier device he called an Audion on March 4, 1906.

Fact 3: Who invented the Transistor? Prior to the invention of the Transistor in 1947, there were vacuum tube amplifiers and electro-mechanical relays, but these old devices were becoming more and more problematical.

Fact 4: Who invented the Transistor? How did the Transistor impact the world? The invention of the Transistor eventually led to the development of solid state devices such as the integrated circuit and the microprocessor. The Transistor

Fact 5: Who invented the Transistor? Without the invention of the Transistor the Information Age and today's digital world would never have happened - there would be no computers and their communication over telephone networks would be impossible. The Transistor is the building block of computer chips.

Fact 6: Who invented the Transistor? There are two different types of Transistor. The point-contact transistor was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain in December 1947 and the junction transistor was invented a month later by William shockley in January 1948.

Fact 7: Who invented the Transistor? The point-contact transistor lost out to the junction transistor, which ultimately achieved huge commercial success and the emergence of modern semiconductors and companies such as Sony and Texas Instruments.

Fact 8: Who invented the Transistor? All three men involved in the invention of the transistor worked at Bell Labs which was established by integrating Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc and AT&T’s Development and Research Department  to bridge the gap between laboratory research and the operations of communication systems.

Fact 9: Who invented the Transistor? The American physicist and electrical engineer John Bardeen was born on May 23, 1908, in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. John Bardeen received his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1928 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University in 1935 and received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Princeton in 1936

Fact 10: Who invented the Transistor? The American physicist Walter Brattain was born in Amoy, China, on February 10, 1902. Walter Brattain received his Bachelor of Science degree from Whitman College in 1924, his Master of Arts from the University of Oregon in 1926 and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1929

Fact 11: Who invented the Transistor? The physicist William Shockley was born on 13 February 1910 in London, England to American parents, and raised in Palo Alto, California, from age three years old. William Shockley received his Bachelor of Science degree from Caltech in 1932 and his Ph.D. degree from MIT in 1936.

Fact 12: Who invented the Transistor? The paths of the three scientists met at Bell Labs. Walter Brattain began work at Bell Labs in 1929, William Shockley joined in 1942 and John Bardeen joined in 1945.

Fact 13: Who invented the Transistor? In 1945 the telephone industry was heavily dependent on the use of vacuum tubes to control electron flow and amplify current. The problem was that vacuum tubes were both unreliable and inefficient. Bell Labs wanted to develop an alternative technology to the old, fragile glass vacuum tubes and formed a solid state physics group that included John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley.

Fact 14: Who invented the Transistor? The members of the solid state physics group got on well but were highly competitive. On Tuesday December 16, 1947 John Bardeen & Walter Brattain invented the first "Point Contact" Transistor. William Shockley, galvanised by the work of John Bardeen & Walter Brattain, then invented the Junction Transistor on January 1, 1948.

Fact 15: Who invented the Transistor? The "Point Contact" Transistor, John Bardeen & Walter Brattain  was a semiconductor device capable of amplification. The voltage on one contact modulated the current flowing through the other, amplifying the input signal up to 100 times. The Junction Transistor invented by William Shockley was also a semiconductor device capable of amplification. The Junction Transistor used both electron and hole charge carriers.

Fact 16: Who invented the Transistor? The junction transistor, which ultimately succeeded, was not patented by William Shockley but John Bardeen and Walter Brattain applied for a US patent for their invention in June 1948 and were awarded patent number 2,524,035 on October 3, 1950.

Fact 17: Who invented the Transistor? The device was named the "transistor" by electrical engineer John Pierce who also worked at Bell Labs. On June 30, 1948, Bell Labs publicly announced the revolutionary solid-state device at a press conference in New York.

Fact 18: Who invented the Transistor? The later invention of William Shockley and the credit he received for the invention infuriated John Bardeen, Walter Brattain. The men were on such bad terms that and William Shockley essentially blocked Brattain and Bardeen from working on the junction transistor.

Fact 19: Who invented the Transistor? In 1956 the three men, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley  were presented with the Nobel Prize in Physics For their "researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".

Fact 20: Who invented the Transistor? The Microchip was independently invented by Jack Kilby (1923 - 2005) and Robert Noyce (1927 - 1990) in 1959.

Fact 20: Who invented the Transistor? John Bardeen died on January 30, 1991 in Boston, Massachusetts, Walter Brattain died on October 13, 1987 in Seattle and William Shockley on August 12, 1989 in Stanford, California. The three scientists have an important place in history as the inventors of the Transistor.