The Invention of the Transistor

                                       by Michael Riordan

                             Stanford University and UC Santa Cruz

Just over half a century ago the transistor was invented at Bell Telephone Laboratories, for
which John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley were awarded the 1956 Nobel prize in
physics. In fact, there were actually three distinctly different versions of the transistor
involved in this breakthrough, the original "field-effect" idea, Bardeen and Brattain's
"point-contact" transistor, and the "junction transistor" that Shockley conceived in January
1948. This talk will recount the sequence of these events in detail, paying particular
attention to the interactions of these three physicists and how their ideas and experiments
led collectively to the first solid-state amplifiers.

Michael Riordan is Assistant to the Director at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center,
Lecturer in Stanford's History and Philosophy of Science Program, and Adjunct Professor of
Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is author of The Hunting of the Quark,
which won the 1988 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award, and coauthor (with
Lillian Hoddeson) of the recently published Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age
(W.W. Norton, 1997), which was awarded the 1999 Sally Hacker Prize of the Society for the
History of Technology.