The tiny, mighty transistor
The humble device turns 60 on Sunday. Along with its descendant, the semiconductor chip, it ushered in the Digital Age.
Alittle electronic device that triggered one of the most dramatic technological explosions in history turns 60 on Sunday. The humble transistor and its descendant, the semiconductor chip, which made the digital revolution possible, today touch nearly every facet of our lives.
All around us, billions upon billions of transistors are quietly at work in computers, cellphones, radios, TVs, printers, copiers, CD players, cars -- in anything with electronics in it. Transistors enabled space exploration and the personal computer revolution. (In the words of Bill Gates, "Without the invention of the transistor, I'm quite sure that the PC would not exist as we know it today.") Without transistors there would be no iPod or hand-held cellphone. No Internet. There would be no multibillion-dollar semiconductor industry, no Intel, Nokia, Microsoft or Google. No Silicon Valley.
Today, the most complex silicon chips can carry more than 1 billion transistors each -- and we manufacture billions of new chips each year. It's nearly impossible to comprehend the numbers. Each year we manufacture about 10 million times as many transistors as there are estimated stars in the Milky Way.
A transistor is a little electronic switch capable of amplifying electric current, invented by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley at Bell Labs in New Jersey on Dec. 16, 1947. They jury-rigged the first transistor using a paper clip, some germanium and gold foil, and found that it boosted electrical current a hundredfold. They kept the discovery to themselves for a bit, and showed their bosses the device just before Christmas. Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956.
Modern electronics had started in 1906 when Lee de Forest discovered that an electrified mesh placed between two electrodes in a vacuum could amplify electrical current and act as a switch. The resulting vacuum tubes soon became the workhorse of electronics, used in radios and the telephone system. By the end of World War I, Western Electric was manufacturing 1 million vacuum tubes a year.
Vacuum tube technology peaked with the construction of the first digital computer, ENIAC, built between 1944 and 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania. ENIAC was a colossal machine -- roughly 100 feet long, 10 feet high and 3 feet deep -- comprising some 100,000 parts, including 18,000 vacuum tubes. Lore has it that when ENIAC was turned on, the lights in western Philadelphia dimmed. A tube would fail every few days and would have to be replaced. That was the downside of vacuum tubes; they consumed an immense amount of power and failed often.
