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...transistor was born just before Christmas 1947 when John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, two scientists working for William Shockley at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., observed that when electrical signals were applied to contacts on a crystal of germanium, the output power was larger than the input. Shockley was not present at that first observation. And though he fathered the discovery in the same way Einstein fathered the atom bomb, by advancing the idea and pointing the way, he felt left out of the momentous occasion...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Solid-State Physicist WILLIAM SHOCKLEY | 3/29/1999 | See Source »

...series of insights made over a few short weeks, he greatly extended the understanding of semiconductor materials and developed the underlying theory of another, much more robust amplifying device--a kind of sandwich made of a crystal with varying impurities added, which came to be known as the junction transistor. By 1951 Shockley's co-workers made his semiconductor sandwich and demonstrated that it behaved much as his theory had predicted...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Solid-State Physicist WILLIAM SHOCKLEY | 3/29/1999 | See Source »

...next couple of decades advances in transistor technology drove the industry, as several companies jumped on the idea and set out to develop commercially viable versions of the device. New ways to create Shockley's sandwich were invented, and transistors in a vast variety of sizes and shapes flooded the market. Shockley's invention had created a new industry, one that underlies all of modern electronics, from supercomputers to talking greeting cards. Today the world produces about as many transistors as it does printed characters in all the newspapers, books, magazines and computer and electronic-copier pages combined...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Solid-State Physicist WILLIAM SHOCKLEY | 3/29/1999 | See Source »

...faster, more reliably and with 1 million times less power--if only someone could get them to function as electronic valves. Shockley and his team figured out how to accomplish this trick. Understanding of the significance of the invention of what came to be called the transistor (for transfer resistance) spread quite rapidly. In 1956 Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain shared a Nobel Prize in Physics--an unusual awarding of the Nobel for the invention of a useful article...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Solid-State Physicist WILLIAM SHOCKLEY | 3/29/1999 | See Source »

...February 1956, with financing from Beckman Instruments Inc., he founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory with the goal of developing and producing a silicon transistor. He chose to establish this start-up near Palo Alto, where he had grown up and where his mother still lived. He set up operations in a storefront--little more than a Quonset hut--and hired a group of young scientists (I was one of them) to develop the necessary technology. By the spring of 1956 he had a small staff in place and was beginning to undertake research and development...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Solid-State Physicist WILLIAM SHOCKLEY | 3/29/1999 | See Source »

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