“Unlocking the Future: How a Simple Discovery Revolutionized Technology and Changed Our Lives Forever”
Walter Brattain continued to work at Bell Labs until 1967 before joining the faculty at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where he remained until his retirement in 1976. He died in 1987 at the age of 85. Thus, while the transistor launched a multi-billion-dollar global industry, beyond their Nobel Prizes none of its three inventors significantly benefited financially from their discovery.
In any piece discussing the origins of the transistor, we would be remiss in not pointing out that Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley were not the sole people working on the transistor when they came up with it. At around the same time as semiconductor research was ramping up at Bell Labs, Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker, German physicists working at the Compagnie de Friens et Signaux in Paris, were investigating similar germanium-based modulation devices. In June 1948, they succeeded in building a working point-contact transistor remarkably similar to Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley’s 1947 prototype. Shortly thereafter, however, Mataré and Welker were dismayed to learn that Bell Labs had already beaten them to the punch. Nevertheless, in 1949 their employer became the first company in Europe to commercially produce transistors.
It should also be mentioned that less than a decade later a number of inventors including Ian Ross, John Wallmark, and Mohammed Atalla developed workable Field-Effect Transistors or FETs. Today, FETS – in particular Metal Oxide or MOSFETs – are the most widely used transistor type in the world, being particularly well-suited to miniaturization. Indeed, while the earliest commercial transistors were on the order of one centimetre in size, modern integrated circuit transistors are so inconceivably tiny that the world’s most powerful single computer chip at the time of the writing of this piece – the Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine 2 – contains an unfathomable 2.6 trillion of them.
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