Inventor of transistor how to#

He tried to be adopted as a Republican candidate for the senate in 1982 but only got 8000 votes. He won but was only awarded $1 in damages. In 1980 he brought a libel suit against a newspaper who had claimed that he was a Nazi. But Shockley wasn't a geneticist and was an amateur in the field - he was accused of using pseudo science to back up his political views. At one demonstration where the students were chanting 'Off Shockley' their microphone went on the blink - he fixed it for them!įor all his benevolence and paternalism, his suggestions - paying people with a low IQ and genetic diseases to be sterilised and setting up sperm banks for high IQ donors - seem distasteful even if you treat them as the outcome of a rigorous logic. Yet he always stood firm for the right of his opponents to say what they were saying. Shockley had to put up with his lectures being disrupted by demonstrators and many threats to his life. I'm sure that Shockley thought that the idea was entirely logical and not in the least bit threatening but any theory even close to eugenics has the tendency to be branded as some sort of right wing search for the master race or at the very least an unpleasant form of racism. He believed in and promoted a form of eugenics - the idea that humans should be bred to improve the species rather than allowed to propagate haphazardly. This would be more or less the end of the story - a Nobel prize, the co-inventor of the transistor and the creator of the Silicon Valley phenomenon - but Shockley strayed outside physics and engineering.

He lectured at Stanford and eventually returned to Bell as a consultant in 1965. In 1960 the company was purchased but Shockley stayed on as a consultant. Shockley regarded the group who left with contempt - he usually referred to them as ' the Traitorous Eight'. In 1957 a group of engineers including Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Jean Hoerni left Shockley Semiconductors to start Fairchild Semiconductors. When a delay made him suspect sabotage he insisted that an employee took a lie detector test. He made salaries public in an attempt to stop secrets. Schockley was a talented engineer but his management style was naive and very strange. Soon afterwards it was announced on the radio and Shockley drove to the lab and took everyone out for a champagne breakfast. A Swedish journalist tried to phone Shockley early in the morning but the line was so bad he thought that someone was trying to play a joke on him. Shockley shared the Nobel prize with Bardeen and Brattain in 1956. The operation was far from a success but from it grew many of the companies that eventually filled Silicon Valley. The four layer switch was generally thought to be a dead end at the time - although eventually it turned out to be quite useful - but Shockley would have been better off working on silicon rather than germanium transistors. He hoped to make use of his knowledge of semi-conductors to build better transistors but he took a wrong turn in choosing to work with a four-layer PNPN structure. A small shed housed Shockley Semiconductors in the area south of Palo Alto that would become known as Silicon Valley. In 1955 Shockley did the almost unheard of thing for a Bell Labs employee - he left to form his own company. Early transistor modules featured lots of empty space!

Inventor of transistor how to#

Other groups were only months behind the Bell Labs team - but for once there is little doubt about who was first.Īt first it wasn't obvious how to package transistors to make best use of their size advantage. Without Shockley the discovery would still have happened. But the junction transistor was the first practical step. Silicon took over from Germanium as the semiconductor of choice and the integrated circuit was invented. The military wasn't too keen to have its brand new 55,000 valve computer replaced and so the first transistorised computers were actually brought to the market by Univac and Philco in 1957.įrom there the pace increased rapidly. In 1953 the first transistor hearing aids were produced, in 1954 the transistor radio was invented and in 1956 IBM started to build the transistor replacement for the SAGE air defence computer. The rest of this part of the story you will already know. The cheap licence was partly altruism and partly to stave off an anti-trust action like the one in progress against AT&T.

The licence was waived to any company manufacturing hearing aids - a concession to Alexander Graham Bell's original work with the deaf. Bell licensed the design to any company who would pay $25,000 - a bargain given that they also offered help on getting the manufacturing right. Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain applied for a joint patent in 1948 on the technology. The junction transistor is relatively easy to make once you know how to handle the semi-conductor materials.