The first transistor was about half an inch high. That's mammoth by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology.

In What’s the point?: The Point Contact transistor I discussed Shockley’s white paper on the theory of the Point Contact Transistor. Let’s look further into this early transistor design. It is ...

65 years ago, December 16th 1947, William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain operated the first ever working point-contact transistor, almost known as the iotatron. Now, so many years later, ...

The first commercially available transistors weren't much like the ones we use today. For one thing, they were big enough to actually see -- something the millions of transistors on a tiny computer ...

NATURE ABHORS A vacuum tube," cracked Bell Labs physicist John Pierce. So did almost everyone else by the 1940s. Sure, vacuum tubes boosted the power of the phone network's electrical signals, which ...

The sandwich transistor was William Shockley's brainchild. It's also called the junction transistor. While the rest of the lab was busy researching Bardeen and Brattain's point-contact transistor, ...

In this lesson, students build two circuits and explore how transistors function. When Bell Labs introduced the transistor in June of 1948, a spokesman proudly announced "This cylindrical object . . .

In his 1948 white paper 1, Shockley wrote, “The theory of the point-contact transistor is that the emitter point-contact introduces holes into the n-type base material. The collector point-contact, ...