Word: transistors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Between the Atoms. In an ordinary electron tube, electrons "boil" off a heated filament into a high vacuum. There, unhampered by clogging air, they dance around obediently in response to electrical forces provided to act upon them. A transistor has no filament or vacuum, only a speck of hard germanium cut from a silvery crystal. But the mobile electrons are there, flashing through the empty channels between the ordered atoms of the crystal fragment...
...these chores are performed by the transistor with startling economy of materials and power. There is no glass envelope, as in an electron tube, and no complicated insides. The current price of germanium is more than $100 a lb., but so little is used that its cost is negligible...
...transistor's greatest advantage is its lack of a heated filament. Most of the currents that pulse through electronic apparatus are extremely small, but when they are amplified or relayed by a conventional vacuum tube, its filament consumes a full watt. It is the same, says Dr. Ralph Bown, vice president in charge of research at Bell Laboratories, as "sending a twelve-car freight train, locomotive and all, to carry a pound of butter." A transistor gets along with a millionth of a watt, not enough in most cases to make it faintly warm. The Bell men take...
Magic Trifle. Bell Laboratory has a two-stage transistor amplifier, complete with resistors and condensers, that is potted in a cylinder of plastic as big as a ¾-inch section cut from a fountain pen. When a faint voice current is fed to this trifle, it gives a signal loud enough to blast the eardrum. Scores of such amplifiers could be packed in a coffee can. One device at Bell has transistors that do the work of 44 vacuum tubes. The whole thing is housed on a panel no bigger than the page of a novel...
...Transistor enthusiasts speak of the future with electronic ecstasy. Replacing vacuum tubes, they say, is not the whole story: transistors will be far more versatile than vacuum tubes. There may be transistor amplifiers in telephone receivers. Airplanes and guided missiles can carry electronic equipment that is now too heavy and fragile. Transistors will give a new impetus to development of electronic-control apparatus for automatic factories. Perhaps the most exciting possibility is in the rapidly growing field of electronic computers. Transistors can be built, theoretically, almost as small as the neurons (nerve cells) that serve as relays in the human...