At Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, physicists demonstrated a tiny device made of germanium, gold foil, and a spring that could amplify electrical signals without a vacuum tube. The transistor would replace bulky, fragile vacuum tubes and become the foundation of nearly all modern electronics, from radios to supercomputers.
The device was almost comically crude: a sliver of germanium, a paperclip-shaped strip of gold foil sliced with a razor blade, and a spring made from a bent paper clip pressing contacts onto the surface. Walter Brattain and John Bardeen had spent weeks failing before stumbling onto the right configuration, and when they showed it to their supervisor William Shockley, the amplified signal came through clearly on an oscilloscope.
Bell Labs kept the discovery quiet for months, wary of tipping off competitors and eager to file patents. The company did not publicly announce the transistor until June 1948, and its true significance took years to sink in even among engineers who assumed vacuum tubes were here to stay.
Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Their crude bench-top device eventually shrank to nanometer scale, and today billions of transistors are etched onto a single chip. Almost every computer, phone, and satellite built since traces its lineage to that afternoon in Murray Hill.
Key people: John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, William Shockley