Invention of the Transistor

On This Day in History: December 23, 1947

My son is an electrical engineer. I asked him what the most important technological advancement of the modern world is. “Probably the transistor,” he said. I’m certainly familiar with the term, but fuck if I know what transistors actually do. Let’s learn together.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 23, 1947--

“Transistor radio” appears in many old songs, but the transistor has become essential to almost every modern electronic gadget. The fuck is a transistor? It’s a type of “semiconductor.” The fuck is a semiconductor? Don’t care. Transistors permit precise control of current flow in a circuit board. I’m lost. Think of it like your brain. It contains about 86 billion cells called neurons, give or take a few billion depending on how much binge drinking you’ve done. A transistor is like a brain cell for a computer. They work both as amplifiers of electric current, turning a small charge into a large one, and they also work as switches. The switch thing is important because it means a transistor can be in two distinct states, meaning it can store two different numbers: zero, and one.

Ohhhh now I get it! Billions of transistors in a memory chip means billions of zeros and ones stored. Anyway, isn’t this supposed to be a fucking history story? When were these transistor things invented so you can watch cat videos on your phone while taking a shit?

Radios used to operate via a vacuum tube triode, whatever the fuck that is. Just know that they’re big and use a lot of power and weren’t that reliable. Three physicists at Bell Labs, William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain, relying somewhat on earlier research from guys who never went on to win Nobel Prizes, got down to work shortly after World War II to create something that could amplify telephone systems. Semiconductors had been around for decades, but there had been significant advancements in the technology during the war.

Bardeen had a flash of insight in December of 1947, and he worked with Brattain to create the point-contact transistor without telling Shockley, who was the team lead. Shockley was both impressed and fucking pissed that they’d left him out. The device was first demonstrated at Bell Labs in New Jersey on December 23, 1947.

But Shockley was all motherfuckers did that without me I’ll show those assholes. He holed up in a hotel in Chicago like a petty little beyotch and brainstormed. What he spitefully came up with was the junction transistor; it was more durable and practical than the point-contact transistor, and easier to manufacture. Suck on that!

The trio won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Shockley, who FYI was a white supremacist piece of shit, began a transistor-making company and inspired the creation of Silicon Valley. Two of his employees went on to found Intel, the world’s largest manufacturer of microchips. One of those employees was Gordon Moore, for whom Moore’s Law was named. Moore’s Law is the thing about the number of transistors on a microchip doubling every two years.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down. They make great gifts, and ‘tis the fuckin’ season!

And don’t forget to