Invention of the Transistors

Bell Telephone Laboratories develops the transistor in 1947.

The transistor revolutionized the electronics industry, allowing the Information Age to occur, and made possible the development of almost every modern electronical device, from telephones to computers to missiles. Bardeen's developments in superconductivity, which won him his second Nobel, are used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Bell Labs

In October 1945, John Bardeen began work at Bell Labs. Bardeen was a member of a Solid State Physics Group, led by William Shockley and chemist Stanley Morgan. Other personnel working in the group were Walter Brattain, physicist Gerald Pearson, chemist Robert Gibney, electronics expert Hilbert Moore and several technicians. He moved his family to Summit, New Jersey.^[6] John Bardeen had met William Shockley when they were both in school in Massachusetts. He rekindled his friendship with Walter Brattain. Bardeen knew Walter Brattain from his graduate school days at Princeton. He had previously met Brattain through Brattain's brother, Bob Brattain. Bob Brattain was also a Princeton graduate student. Over the years the friendship of Bardeen and Brattain grew, both in the lab, where Brattain put together the experiments and Bardeen wove theories to explain the results and also on the golf course where they spent time on the weekends.

The assignment of the group was to seek a solid-state alternative to fragile glass vacuum tube amplifiers

On December 23, 1947, Bardeen and Brattain—working without Shockley—succeeded in creating a point-contact transistor that achieved amplification

[1]

[1] The invention of the transistor; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen#The_invention_of_the_transistor