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THE INVENTION OF THE TRANSISTOR. First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of the first comprehensive report on the transistor, one of the most important inventions of the 20th Century. "In the 1930s, Bell Labs scientists were trying to use ultrahigh frequency waves for telephone communications, and needed a more reliable detection method than the vacuum tube, which proved incapable of picking up rapid vibrations . John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley spearheaded the Bell Labs effort to develop a new means of amplification," developing, by 1948, a novel device that would effectively amplify and control electric signals. "At roughly half an inch high, the first transistor was huge by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit onto a single silicon chip. But it was the very first solid state device capable of doing the amplification work of a vacuum tube, earning Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. More significantly, it spawned an entire industry and ushered in the Information Age, revolutionizing global society" (The American Physical Society). The invention of the transistor was first announced in three short letters by Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley, and Pearson, in The Physical Review (July 1948). The following year Bardeen and Brattain published the more comprehensive report Physical Principles Involved in Transistor Action . This paper was simultaneously published, the same month, in The Physical Review and The Bell System Technical Journal. Offered here is the Bell printing [no priority established]. In 1956 Bardeen and Brattain shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with William Shockley "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect". In 1972 Bardeen again received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the development of the theory of superconductivity (BCS-theory), and thus became the only person, until this day, to receive the Nobel Prize more than once in the same field. Provenance: Regnar Holfrid Svensson (1910-90), Swedish engineer and inventor (signature to front wrapper). "The first patent for the field-effect transistor principle was filed in Canada by Austrian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld on October 22, 1925, but Lilienfeld published no research articles about his devices, and his work was ignored by industry. In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another field-effect transistor. There is no direct evidence that these devices were built, but later work in the 1990s show that one of Lilienfeld s designs worked as described and gave substantial gain. Legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that William Shockley and a co-worker at Bell Labs, Gerald Pearson, had built operational versions from Lilienfeld s patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles. "The Bell Labs work on the transistor emerged from war-time efforts to produce extremely pure germanium crystal mixer diodes, used in radar units as a frequency mixer element in microwave radar receivers. UK researchers had produced models using a tungsten filament on a germanium disk, but these were difficult to manufacture and not particularly robust. Bell s version was a single-crystal design that was both smaller and completely solid. A parallel project on germanium diodes at Purdue University succeeded in producing the good-quality germanium semiconducting crystals that were used at Bell Labs. Early tube-based circuits did not switch fast enough for this role, leading the Bell team to use solid-state diodes instead. After the war, Shockley decided to attempt the building of a triode-like semiconductor device. He secured funding and lab space, and went to work on the problem with Bardeen and Brattain. John Bardeen eventually developed a new branch of quantum mechanics known as surface physics to account for the odd behavior they saw, and Bardeen and Walter Bratta.
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