“Unlocking the Future: How a Simple Discovery Revolutionized Technology and Changed Our Lives Forever”
By contrast, William Shockley, on sabbatical in Europe at the time, was enraged to discover that not only had he not been directly involved in the team’s breakthrough – but that they had strayed so far from his original field-effect concept. It was a bitterness which was to prove surprisingly productive.
On June 30, 1948, Bell Labs officially announced Brattain and Bardeen’s discovery, which by now had acquired a new name: transistor. The term had been coined by fellow Bell engineer and part-time science fiction writer John Pierce as a contraction of “trans-resistor”. Unfortunately, however, the announcement of the transistor received little attention in either the popular or scientific press. Not only were there few apparent applications for the device, but it was fragile, temperamental, and difficult to manufacture. Furthermore, even its inventors didn’t understand exactly how it worked.
Meanwhile, Shockley, fuelled by jealousy and indignation, doggedly pursued his quest to one-up his colleagues. While attending a meeting of the Physical Society in Chicago in late 1947, he began filling his notebook with page after page of detailed notes describing a new type of transistor, consisting of one layer of P-type semiconductor sandwiched between two layers of N-type semiconductor. By January 23, 1948, Shockley had come up with a workable design, which worked similarly to a PN diode but with three terminals: the emitter, the collector, and the base. When a positive current was applied to the base, it disrupted the depletion region between the semiconductor layers by draining away excess electrons, allowing current to flow between the emitter and the collector. Bardeen and Brattain’s transistor worked in a similar fashion, only the currents travelled through a thin layer at the top of the germanium crystal. One month after Shockley perfected his theoretical design, Bell Labs filed four patents for semiconductor amplifiers – both Brattain and Bardeen’s original point contact design and Shockley’s bipolar junction or NPN transistor.
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