Re: 2005 car in 1955


Robert A. Woodward wrote:

> I believe that the transistor is a late 40s development

Further on this. The transistor dates from 1947, but the P-N junction
was discovered in 1939.

(It's a great story. The researcher, a guy named Russell Ohl, had been
noodling with ever-purer bits of silicon. Finally Ohl got a rod of
99.99+% pure stuff, hooked it into a circuit, and started messing with
it. To his surprise, the current went /way/ up and down as he moved
the rod around. It took him a while to realize that it was varying
with the amount of light shining on the rod...)

Semiconductor research had been around since the early '30s; Bell Labs
was set up deliberately to look for alternatives to vacuum tubes. That
was 1925.

Granted, they spent the next five years bouncing off the problem. The
technology wasn't quite there, and while they had quantum theory and
Wilson's Theory of Metals, they didn't understand how semiconductors
really worked. So, not only couldn't they get the purities and the
dopings right, they weren't even clear on the fact that purities and
doping were major issues.

What pushed them over the top was the P-N junction on one hand, and the
explosion of semiconductor diodes in WWII on the other. (Germanium
rectifiers in radar sets were semiconductors' first killer app.) By
the end of the war, they'd reached a critical mass of both theory and
practical experience. Bell Labs recognized this, and reorganized in
1945 to very deliberately pursue a "solid state amplifier".

In retrospect it's mildly surprising that it took them another two
years, but then they got down some dead ends. In fact, the first
transistor turned out to be a Little Boy, not a Fat Man... it was a
point-contact transistor, good for proof-of-concept but not much more.
Shockley developed the much better sandwich transistor a few months
later. Like the Manhattan Project, Bell Labs had been using multiple
lines of development (though their budget was rather smaller).

But going back to the Campbell article... Googling briefly, I see that
the first generation of solid state researchers were already out of
school and hard at work by 1929. Russell Ohl, for instance, was born
in 1898 and went to work for Bell Labs in 1927. Walter Brattain -- who
would build that first point-of-contact transistor in 1947, and win the
Nobel Prize for it a few years later -- was born in 1902 and started
with Bell Labs in 1929.

Even the term "solid state" seems to date from this period; it was
definitely around by the early '30s.

So I'm less and less certain that they'd be baffled by Nixon-era
electronics.


> IIRC, John Campbell did THREE versions of this editorial (but I
> have to dig through lots of issues to find which issues have it).

IMS the title was something like "No Borrowing".


Doug M.

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Relevant Pages

  • Re: OT: Rant on Dictatorship
    ... John Larkin wrote: ... In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another field-effect transistor. ... The junction transistor was certainly invented at Bell Labs. ... and then the MIT RadLab did extensive theoretical and practical work. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: OT: Rant on Dictatorship
    ... In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another field-effect transistor. ... Legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that Shockley and Pearson had built operational ... The junction transistor was certainly invented at Bell Labs. ... and then the MIT RadLab did extensive theoretical and practical work. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: OT: Rant on Dictatorship
    ... In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another field-effect transistor. ... Legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that Shockley and Pearson had built operational ... The junction transistor was certainly invented at Bell Labs. ... and then the MIT RadLab did extensive theoretical and practical work. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: Sigh
    ... when Bell Labs gave the technology away. ... Unless you're selling rat poison, ... maybe that doesn't apply to the transistor either. ... it's a 3.0 dual core *gigahickey. ...
    (rec.arts.sf.written)
  • Re: IQ and Race...
    ... ..and not too many decades ago Dr. William Shottkey, ... the first diode and transistor at Bell Labs, ...
    (alt.guitar.amps)