The Truth Behind Transistor Invention

THE TRANSISTOR

The invention of computers did not immediately launch a revolution. Because they relied on large, expensive, fragile vacuum tubes that consumed a lot of power, the first computers were costly behemoths that only corporations, research universities, and the military could afford. Instead the true birth of the digital age, the era in which electronic devices became embedded in every aspect of our lives, occurred in Murray Hill, New Jersey, shortly after lunchtime on Tuesday, December 16, 1947. That day two scientists at Bell Labs succeeded in putting together a tiny contraption they had concocted from some strips of gold foil, a chip of semiconducting material, and a bent paper clip. When wiggled just right, it could amplify an electric current and switch it on and off. The transistor, as the device was soon named, became to the digital age what the steam engine was to the Industrial Revolution.

The advent of transistors, and the subsequent innovations that allowed millions of them to be etched onto tiny microchips, meant that the processing power of many thousands of ENIACs could be nestled inside the nose cone of rocket ships, in computers that could sit on your lap, in calculators and music players that could fit in your pocket, and in handheld devices that could exchange information or entertainment with any nook or node of a networked planet.

Three passionate and intense colleagues, whose personalities both complemented and conflicted with one another, would go down in history as the inventors of the transistor: a deft experimentalist named Walter Brattain, a quantum theorist named John Bardeen, and the most passionate and intense of them all—tragically so by the end—a solid-state physics expert named William Shockley.

But there was another player in this drama that was actually as important as any individual: Bell Labs, where these men worked. What made the transistor possible was a mixture of diverse talents rather than just the imaginative leaps of a few geniuses. By its nature, the transistor required a team that threw together theorists who had an intuitive feel for quantum phenomena with material scientists who were adroit at baking impurities into batches of silicon, along with dexterous experimentalists, industrial chemists, manufacturing specialists, and ingenious tinkerers.

BELL LABS

In 1907 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company faced a crisis. The patents of its founder, Alexander Graham Bell, had expired, and it seemed in danger of losing its near-monopoly on phone services. Its board summoned back a retired president, Theodore Vail, who decided to reinvigorate the company by committing to a bold goal: building a system that could connect a call between New York and San Francisco. The challenge required combining feats of engineering with leaps of pure science. Making use of vacuum tubes and other new technologies, AT&T built repeaters and amplifying devices that accomplished the task in January 1915. On the historic first transcontinental call, in addition to Vail and President Woodrow Wilson, was Bell himself, who echoed his famous words from thirty-nine years earlier, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” This time his former assistant Thomas Watson, who was in San Francisco, replied, “It would take me a week.”

Thus was the seed planted for a new industrial organization that became known as Bell Labs. Originally located on the western edge of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village overlooking the Hudson River, it brought together theoreticians, materials scientists, metallurgists, engineers, and even AT&T pole climbers. It was where George Stibitz developed a computer using electromagnetic relays and Claude Shannon worked on information theory. Like Xerox PARC and other corporate research satellites that followed, Bell Labs showed how sustained innovation could occur when people with a variety of talents were brought together, preferably in close physical proximity where they could have frequent meetings and serendipitous encounters. That was the upside. The downside was that these were big bureaucracies under corporate thumbs; Bell Labs, like Xerox PARC, showed the limits of industrial organizations when they don’t have passionate leaders and rebels who can turn innovations into great products.

The head of Bell Labs’ vacuum-tube department was a high-octane Missourian named Mervin Kelly, who had studied to be a metallurgist at the Missouri School of Mines and then got a PhD in physics under Robert Millikan at the University of Chicago. He was able to make vacuum tubes more reliable by devising a water-cooling system, but he realized that tubes would never be an efficient method of amplification or switching. In 1936 he was promoted to research director of Bell Labs, and his first priority was to find an alternative.

Kelly’s great insight was that Bell Labs, which had been a bastion of practical engineering, should also focus on basic science and theoretical research, until then the domain of universities. He began a search for the country’s brightest young physics PhDs. His mission was to make innovation something that an industrial organization could do on a regular basis rather than ceding that territory to eccentric geniuses holed up in garages and garrets.

“It had become a matter of some consideration at the Labs whether the key to invention was a matter of individual genius or collaboration,” Jon Gertner wrote in The Idea Factory, a study of Bell Labs. The answer was both. “It takes many men in many fields of science, pooling their various talents, to funnel all the necessary research into the development of one new device,” Shockley later explained. He was right. He was also, however, showing a rare flash of feigned humility. More than anyone, he believed in the importance of the individual genius, such as himself. Even Kelly, the proselytizer for collaboration, realized that individual genius also needed to be nurtured. “With all the needed emphasis on leadership, organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount importance,” he once said. “It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.”

The key to innovation—at Bell Labs and in the digital age in general—was realizing that there was no conflict between nurturing individual geniuses and promoting collaborative teamwork. It was not either-or. Indeed, throughout the digital age, the two approaches went together. Creative geniuses (John Mauchly, William Shockley, Steve Jobs) generated innovative ideas. Practical engineers (Presper Eckert, Walter Brattain, Steve Wozniak) partnered closely with them to turn concepts into contraptions. And collaborative teams of technicians and entrepreneurs worked to turn the invention into a practical product. When part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to history’s basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such as Penn after Mauchly and Eckert left, Princeton after von Neumann, or Bell Labs after Shockley, innovation slowly withered.

The need to combine theorists with engineers was particularly true in a field that was becoming increasingly important at Bell Labs: solid-state physics, which studied how electrons flow through solid materials. In the 1930s, Bell Labs engineers were tinkering with materials such as silicon—after oxygen the most common element in the earth’s crust and a key component of sand—in order to juice them into performing electronic tricks. At the same time in the same building, Bell theorists were wrestling with the mind-bending discoveries of quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics is based on theories developed by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and others about what goes on inside an atom. In 1913 Bohr had come up with a model of atomic structure in which electrons orbited around a nucleus at specific levels. They could make a quantum leap from one level to the next, but never be in between. The number of electrons in the outer orbital level helped to determine

the chemical and electronic properties of the element, including how well it conducted electricity.

Some elements, such as copper, are good conductors of electricity. Others, such as sulfur, are horrible conductors, and are thus good insulators. And then there are those in between, such as silicon and germanium, which are known as semiconductors. What makes them useful is that they are easy to manipulate into becoming better conductors. For example, if you contaminate silicon with a tiny amount of arsenic or boron, its electrons become more free to move.

The advances in quantum theory came at the same time that metallurgists at Bell Labs were finding ways to create new materials using novel purification techniques, chemical tricks, and recipes for combining rare and ordinary minerals. In seeking to solve some everyday problems, like vacuum-tube filaments that burned out too quickly or telephone-speaker diaphragms that sounded too tinny, they were mixing new alloys and developing methods to heat or cool concoctions until they performed better. By trial and error, like cooks in a kitchen, they were creating a revolution in materials science that would go hand in hand with the theoretical revolution that was occurring in quantum mechanics.

As they experimented with their samples of silicon and germanium, the chemical engineers at Bell Labs stumbled across evidence for much of what the theorists were conjecturing. It became clear that there was a lot that the theorists, engineers, and metallurgists could learn from one another. So in 1936 a solid-state study group was formed at Bell Labs that included a potent mix of practical and theoretical stars. It met once a week in the late afternoon to share findings, engage in a bit of academic-style trash talk, and then adjourn for informal discussions that lasted late into the night. There was value to getting together in person rather than just reading each other’s papers: the intense interactions allowed ideas to be kicked into higher orbits and, like electrons, occasionally break loose to spark chain reactions.

Of all the people in the group, one stood out. William Shockley, a theorist who had arrived at Bell Labs right when the study group was being formed, impressed the others, and sometimes frightened them, with both his intellect and his intensity.

WILLIAM SHOCKLEY

William Shockley grew up with a love of both art and science. His father studied mine engineering at MIT, took music courses in New York, and learned seven languages as he wandered through Europe and Asia as an adventurer and mineral speculator. His mother majored in both math and art at Stanford and was one of the first known climbers to succeed in a solo ascent of Mt. Whitney. They met in a tiny Nevada mining village, Tonopah, where he was staking claims and she had gone to do surveying work. After they were married, they moved to London, where their son was born in 1910.

William would be their only child, and for that they were thankful. Even as a baby he had a ferocious temper, with fits of rage so loud and long that his parents kept losing babysitters and apartments. In a journal his father described the boy “screaming at the top of his voice and bending and throwing himself back” and recorded that he “has bitten his mother severely many times.” His tenacity was ferocious. In any situation, he simply had to have his way. His parents eventually adopted a policy of surrender. They abandoned any attempt to discipline him, and until he was eight they home-schooled him. By then they had moved to Palo Alto, where his mother’s parents lived.

Convinced that their son was a genius, William’s parents had him evaluated by Lewis Terman, who had devised the Stanford–Binet IQ test and was planning a study of gifted children. Young Shockley scored in the high 120s, which was respectable but not enough for Terman to label him a genius. Shockley would become obsessed by IQ tests and use them to assess job applicants and even colleagues, and he developed increasingly virulent theories about race and inherited intelligence that would poison the later years of his life. Perhaps he should have learned from his own life the shortcomings of IQ tests. Despite being certified as a nongenius, he was smart enough to skip middle school and get a degree from Caltech and then a doctorate in solid-state physics from MIT. He was incisive, creative, and ambitious. Even though he loved performing magic tricks and playing practical jokes, he never learned to be easygoing or friendly. He had an intellectual and personal intensity, resonating from his childhood, that made him difficult to deal with, all the more so as he became successful.

When Shockley graduated from MIT in 1936, Mervin Kelly came up from Bell Labs to interview him and offered him a job on the spot. He also gave Shockley a mission: find a way to replace vacuum tubes with a device that was more stable, solid, and cheap. After three years, Shockley became convinced he could find a solution using solid material such as silicon rather than glowing filaments in a bulb. “It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible,” he wrote in his lab notebook on December 29, 1939.

Shockley had the ability to visualize quantum theory, how it explained the movement of electrons, the way a choreographer can visualize a dance. His colleagues said that he could look at semiconducting material and see the electrons. However, in order to transform his artist’s intuitions into a real invention, Shockley needed a partner who was an adroit experimenter, just as Mauchly needed Eckert. This being Bell Labs, there were many in the building, most notably the merrily cantankerous westerner Walter Brattain, who enjoyed making ingenious devices with semiconducting compounds such as copper oxide. For example, he built electric rectifiers, which turn alternating current into direct current, based on the fact that current flows in only one direction through an interface where a piece of copper meets a layer of copper oxide.

Brattain grew up on an isolated ranch in eastern Washington State, where as a boy he herded cattle. With his raspy voice and homespun demeanor, he affected the self-deprecating style of a confident cowboy. He was a natural-born tinkerer with deft fingers, and he loved devising experiments. “He could put things together out of sealing wax and paper clips,” recalled an engineer he worked with at Bell Labs.8 But he also had a laid-back cleverness that led him to seek shortcuts rather than plod through repetitious trials.

Shockley had an idea for finding a solid-state replacement for a vacuum tube by putting a grid into a layer of copper oxide. Brattain was skeptical. He laughed and told Shockley that he had tried that approach before, and it never ended up producing an amplifier. But Shockley kept pushing. “It’s so damned important,” Brattain finally said, “that if you’ll tell me how you want it made, we’ll try it.” But as Brattain predicted, it didn’t work.

Before Shockley and Brattain could figure out why it had failed, World War II intervened. Shockley went off to become a research director in the Navy’s antisubmarine group, where he developed analyses of bomb detonation depths to improve attacks on German U-boats. He later traveled to Europe and Asia to help B-29 bomber fleets use radar. Brattain likewise left for Washington to work on submarine-detection technologies for the Navy, focusing on airborne magnetic devices.

THE SOLID-STATE TEAM

While Shockley and Brattain were away, the war was transforming Bell Labs. It became part of the triangular relationship that was forged among the government, research universities, and private industry. As the historian Jon Gertner noted, “In the first few years after Pearl Harbor, Bell Labs took on nearly a thousand different projects for the military—everything from tank radio sets to communications systems for pilots wearing oxygen masks to enciphering machines for scrambling secret messages.” The staff doubled in size, to nine thousand.

Having outgrown its Manhattan headquarters, most of Bell Labs moved to two hundred rolling acres in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Mervin Kelly and his colleagues wanted their new home to feel like an academic campus, but without the segregation of various disciplines into different buildings. They knew that creativity came through chance encounters. “All buildings have been connected so as to avoid fixed geographical delineation between departments and to encourage free interchange and close contact among them,” an executive wrote. The corridors were extremely long, more than the length of two football fields, and designed to promote random meetings among people with different talents and specialties, a strategy that Steve Jobs replicated in designing Apple’s new headquarters seventy years later. Anyone walking around Bell Labs might be bombarded with random ideas, soaking them up like a solar cell. Claude Shannon, the eccentric information theorist, would sometimes ride a unicycle up and down the long red terrazzo corridors while juggling three balls and nodding at colleagues. It was a wacky metaphor for the balls-in-the-air ferment in the halls.

In November 1941 Brattain had made his last journal entry, into his notebook #18194, before leaving Bell Labs in Manhattan for his wartime service. Almost four years later, he picked up that same notebook in his new lab in Murray Hill and began anew with the entry “The war is over.” Kelly assigned him and Shockley to a research group that was designed “to achieve a unified approach to the theoretical and experimental work of the solid state area.” Its mission was the same as they had before the war: to create a replacement for the vacuum tube using semiconductors.

When Kelly sent around the list of who was going to be on the solid-state research group, Brattain marveled that it included no losers. “By golly! There isn’t an s.o.b. in the group,” he recalled saying, before pausing to worry, “Maybe I was the s.o.b. in the group.” As he later declared, “It was probably one of the greatest research teams ever pulled together.”

Shockley was the primary theoretician, but given his duties as the team’s supervisor—he was on a different floor—they decided to bring in an additional theorist. They chose a soft-spoken expert in quantum theory, John Bardeen. A child genius who had skipped three grades in school, Bardeen had written his doctoral thesis under Eugene Wigner at Princeton and during his wartime service in the Naval Ordnance Laboratory discussed torpedo design with Einstein. He was one of the world’s greatest experts on using quantum theory to understand how materials conduct electricity, and he had, according to colleagues, a “genuine ability to collaborate easily with experimentalist and theorist alike.” There was initially no separate office for Bardeen, so he ensconced himself in Brattain’s lab space. It was a smart move that showed, once again, the creative energy generated by physical proximity. By sitting together, the theorist and the experimentalist could brainstorm ideas face-to-face, hour after hour.

Unlike Brattain, who was voluble and talkative, Bardeen was so quiet that he was dubbed “Whispering John.” To understand his mumbling, people had to lean forward, but they learned that it was worth it. He was also contemplative and cautious, unlike Shockley, who was lightning-quick and impulsively spouted theories and assertions.

Their insights came from interactions with each other. “The close collaboration between experimentalists and theorists extended through all stages of the research, from the conception of the experiment to the analysis of the results,” said Bardeen. Their impromptu meetings, usually led by Shockley, occurred almost every day, a quintessential display of finish-each-other’s-sentence creativity. “We would meet to discuss important steps almost on the spur of the moment,” Brattain said. “Many of us had ideas in these discussion groups, one person’s remarks suggesting an idea to another.”

These meetings became known as “blackboard sessions” or “chalk talks” because Shockley would stand, chalk in hand, scribbling down ideas. Brattain, ever brash, would pace around the back of the room and shout out objections to some of Shockley’s suggestions, sometimes betting a dollar they wouldn’t work. Shockley didn’t like losing. “I finally found out he was annoyed when he paid me off once in ten dimes,” Brattain recalled. The interactions would spill over into their social outings; they often played golf together, went out for beer at a diner called Snuffy’s, and joined in bridge matches with their spouses.

THE TRANSISTOR

With his new team at Bell Labs, Shockley resurrected the theory he had been playing with five years earlier for a solid-state replacement for the vacuum tube. If a strong electrical field was placed right next to a slab of semiconducting material, he posited, the field would pull some electrons to the surface and permit a surge of current through the slab. This potentially would allow a semiconductor to use a very small signal to control a much larger signal. A very low-powered current could provide the input, and it could control (or switch on and off) a much higher-powered output current. Thus the semiconductor could be used as an amplifier or an on-off switch, just like a vacuum tube.

There was one small problem with this “field effect”: when Shockley tested the theory—his team charged a plate with a thousand volts and put it only a millimeter away from a semiconductor surface—it didn’t work. “No observable change in current,” he wrote in his lab notebook. It was, he later said, “quite mysterious.”

Figuring out why a theory failed can point the way to a better one, so Shockley asked Bardeen to come up with an explanation. The two of them spent hours discussing what are known as “surface states,” the electronic properties and quantum-mechanical description of the atom layers closest to the surface of materials. After five months, Bardeen had his insight. He went to the blackboard in the workspace he shared with Brattain and began to write.

Bardeen realized that when a semiconductor is charged, electrons become trapped on its surface. They cannot move about freely. They form a shield, and an electric field, even a strong one a millimeter away, cannot penetrate this barrier. “These added electrons were trapped, immobile, in surface states,” Shockley noted. “In effect, the surface states shielded the interior of the semiconductor from the influence of the positively charged control plate.”

The team now had a new mission: find a way to break through the shield that formed on the surface of semiconductors. “We concentrated on new experiments related to Bardeen’s surface states,” Shockley explained. They would have to breach this barrier in order to goose the semiconductor into being able to regulate, switch, and amplify current.

Progress was slow over the next year, but in November 1947 a series of breakthroughs led to what became known as the Miracle Month. Bardeen built on the theory of the “photovoltaic effect,” which says that shining light on two dissimilar materials that are in contact with one another will produce an electric voltage. That process, he surmised, might dislodge some of the electrons that created the shield. Brattain, working side by side with Bardeen, devised ingenious experiments to test out ways to do this.

After a while, serendipity proved to be their friend. Brattain conducted some of the experiments in a thermos so he could vary the temperature. But condensation on the silicon kept gunking up the measurements. The best way to solve that would be to put the entire apparatus in a vacuum, but that would have required a lot of work. “I’m essentially a lazy physicist,” Brattain admitted. “So I got the idea to immerse the system in a dielectric liquid.” He filled the thermos with water, which proved a simple way to avoid the condensation problem. He and Bardeen tried it out on November 17, and it worked beautifully.

That was a Monday. Throughout that week, they bounced through a series of theoretical and experimental ideas. By Friday, Bardeen had come up with a way to eliminate the need to immerse the apparatus in water. Instead, he suggested, they could just use a drop of water, or a little gel, right where a sharp metal point jabbed down into the piece of silicon. “Come on, John,” Brattain responded enthusiastically. “Let’s go make it.” One challenge was that the metal point couldn’t be allowed contact with the water drop, but Brattain was an improvisational wizard and solved that with a bit of sealing wax. He found a nice slab of silicon, put a tiny drop of water on it, coated a piece of wire with wax to insulate it, and jabbed the wire through the water drop and into the silicon. It worked. It was able to amplify a current, at least slightly. From this “point-contact” contraption the transistor was born.

Bardeen went into the office the next morning to record the results in his notebook. “These tests show definitely that it is possible to introduce an electrode or grid to control the flow of current in a semiconductor,” he concluded. He even went in on Sunday, which he normally reserved for golf. They also decided it was time to call Shockley, who had been immersed for months in other matters. Over the next two weeks he would come down and offer suggestions, but he mainly let his dynamic duo proceed apace.

Sitting side by side at Brattain’s lab bench, Bardeen would quietly offer ideas and Brattain would excitedly try them out. Sometimes Bardeen wrote in Brattain’s notebook as the experiments were being conducted. Thanksgiving passed with little notice as they tried different designs: germanium instead of silicon, lacquer rather than wax, gold for the contact points.

Usually Bardeen’s theories led to Brattain’s experiments, but sometimes the process worked in reverse: unexpected results drove new theories. In one of the germanium experiments, the current seemed to flow in the opposite direction from what they expected. But it was amplified by a factor of more than three hundred, far more than they had previously achieved. So they ended up acting out the old physicist joke: they knew that the approach worked in practice, but could they make it work in theory? Bardeen soon found a way to do so. He realized that the negative voltage was driving away electrons, causing an increase in “electron holes,” which occur when there is no electron in a position where one could exist. The existence of such holes attracts a flow of electrons.

There was one problem: this new method did not amplify higher frequencies, including audible sounds. That would make it useless for telephones. Bardeen theorized that the water or electrolyte drop was making things sluggish. So he improvised a few other designs. One involved a wire point stuck into the germanium just a tiny distance from a gold plate that was creating a field. It succeeded in amplifying the voltage, at least slightly, and it worked at higher frequencies. Once again Bardeen supplied a theory for the serendipitous results: “The experiment suggested that holes were flowing into the germanium surface from the gold spot.”

Like a call-and-response duet sitting together at a piano, Bardeen and Brattain continued their iterative creativity. They realized that the best way to increase the amplification would be to have two point-contacts jabbed into the germanium really close together. Bardeen calculated that they should be less than two-thousandths of an inch apart. That was a challenge, even for Brattain. But he came up with a clever method: he glued a piece of gold foil onto a small plastic wedge that looked like an arrowhead, then he used a razor blade to cut a thin slit in the foil at the tip of the wedge, thus forming two gold contact points close together. “That’s all I did,” Brattain recounted. “I slit carefully with the razor until the circuit opened, and put it on a spring and put it down on the same piece of germanium.”

When Brattain and Bardeen tried it on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 16, 1947, something amazing happened: the contraption worked. “I found if I wiggled it just right,” Brattain recalled, “that I had an amplifier with the order of magnitude of one hundred amplification, clear up to the audio range.” On his way home that evening, the voluble and talkative Brattain told the others in his carpool he had just done “the most important experiment that I’d ever do in my life.” He then made them pledge not to say anything. Bardeen, as was his wont, was less talkative. When he got home that night, however, he did something unusual: he told his wife about something that happened at the office. It was only a sentence. As she was peeling carrots at the kitchen sink, he mumbled quietly, “We discovered something important today.”

Indeed, the transistor was one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century. It came from the partnership of a theorist and an experimentalist working side by side, in a symbiotic relationship, bouncing theories and results back and forth in real time. It also came from embedding them in an environment where they could walk down a long corridor and bump into experts who could manipulate the impurities in germanium, or be in a study group populated by people who understood the quantum-mechanical explanations of surface states, or sit in a cafeteria with engineers who knew all the tricks for transmitting phone signals over long distances.

Shockley convened a demonstration for the rest of the semiconductor group and a few Bell Labs supervisors on the following Tuesday, December 23. The executives put on earphones and took turns speaking into a microphone so that they could hear for themselves the actual amplification of a human voice using a simple, solid-state device. It was a moment that should have resonated like Alexander Graham Bell’s first words barked on a telephone, but no one later could recall the words spoken into the device on that momentous afternoon. Instead the event was memorialized for history by understated entries made into lab notebooks. “By switching the device in and out, a distinct gain in speech level could be heard,” Brattain wrote. Bardeen’s entry was even more matter-of-fact: “Voltage amplification was obtained with use of two gold electrodes on a specifically prepared germanium surface.”

SHOCKLEY’S ONE-UPMANSHIP

Shockley signed Bardeen’s historic notebook entry as a witness, but he did not make any entries of his own that day. He was clearly rattled. The pride he should have felt in the success of his team was overshadowed by his intense and dark competitive drive. “My emotions were somewhat conflicted,” he later admitted. “My elation with the group’s success was tempered by not being one of the inventors. I experienced some frustration that my personal efforts, started more than eight years before, had not resulted in a significant inventive contribution of my own.” There were demons that increasingly gnawed away deep in his psyche. He would never again be friends with Bardeen and Brattain. Instead he started working feverishly to claim equal credit for the invention and to create, on his own, an even better version.

Shortly after Christmas, Shockley took the train to Chicago to attend two conferences, but he spent most of his time in his room at the Bismarck Hotel devising a revised method for creating the device. On New Year’s Eve, as partygoers danced in the ballroom below, he wrote seven pages of notes on lined graph paper. When he woke up on New Year’s Day of 1948, he wrote thirteen more. These he sent by airmail back to a colleague at Bell Labs who glued them into Shockley’s lab notebook and asked Bardeen to sign them as a witness.

By then Mervin Kelly had assigned one of the Bell Lab attorneys to produce, as fast as possible, a set of patent applications for the new device. This was not Iowa State, where there was no one on staff to handle such a task. When Shockley returned from Chicago, he discovered that Bardeen and Brattain had already been consulted, and he was upset. He called them into his office separately and explained why he should get the primary—perhaps even sole—credit. “He thought,” Brattain recalled, “that he could write a patent, starting with the field effect, on the whole damn thing.” Bardeen was characteristically silent, though he did mutter bitterly once it was over. Brattain, as was his wont, was blunt. “Oh hell, Shockley,” he yelled. “There’s enough glory in this for everybody.”

Shockley pressed Bell’s lawyers to apply for a very broad patent based on his own initial insight about how a field effect could influence current in a semiconductor. But in their research the lawyers discovered that a patent had been granted in 1930 to a little-known physicist named Julius Lilienfeld, who had proposed (but never built or understood) a device using the field effect. So they decided to pursue a patent for the more narrow invention of a point-contact method of making a semiconductor device, and the only names on that particular application would be Bardeen and Brattain. The attorneys questioned the two of them separately, and both said that it had been a joint effort in which each of them contributed equally. Shockley was furious that he was being left off the most important of the patent applications. Bell executives tried to paper over the rift by requiring that all publicity photos and press releases include all three men.

Over the next few weeks, Shockley became increasingly disconcerted, so much so that he had trouble sleeping. His “will to think,” as he called it, was driven by “my own motivation to play a more significant personal, rather than managerial, role in what was obviously a development of enormous potential importance.” At odd hours of the night, he would pace around searching for better ways to make the device. Early on the morning of January 23, 1948, a month after the demonstration of the Bardeen-Brattain invention, Shockley woke up with an insight that pulled together the thinking he had done on his trip to Chicago. Sitting at his kitchen table, he began writing furiously.

Shockley’s idea involved a way to make a semiconductor amplifier that was less rickety than the contrivance that Bardeen and Brattain had rigged up. Instead of jamming gold points into a slab of germanium, Shockley envisioned a simpler “junction” approach that looked like a sandwich. It would have a top and bottom layer of germanium that had been doped with impurities so that they had an excess of electrons, and sandwiched between them would be a thin slice of germanium that had holes or a deficit of electrons. The layers with an excess of electrons were called “n-type” germanium, for negative, and the layer with a deficit or holes where electrons could be was called “p-type,” for positive. Each of the layers would be attached to a wire that allowed its voltage to be tweaked. The middle layer would be an adjustable barrier that, depending how turned on it was by voltage, regulated the current of electrons that flowed between the top and bottom layers. Applying a small positive voltage to this barrier would, Shockley wrote, “increase the flow of electrons over the barrier exponentially.” The stronger the charge on this inside p-type layer, the more it would suck electrons from one outside n-type layer to the other. In other words, it could amplify or switch off the current going through the semiconductor—and do so in mere billionths of a second.

Shockley put some notes in his lab book, but he kept his idea secret for almost a month. “I had a competitive urge to make some important transistor inventions on my own,” he later conceded. He did not tell his colleagues until mid-February, when they were at a presentation of some related work by a Bell Labs scientist. Shockley recalled being “startled” when the scientist presented some findings that supported the theoretical basis for a junction device, and he realized that someone in the audience, most likely Bardeen, might take the logical next steps. “From that point on,” he asserted, “the concept of using p-n junctions rather than metal point contacts would have been but a small step and the junction transistor would have been invented.” So before Bardeen or anyone else could suggest such a device, Shockley leaped up and took the stage to reveal the design he had been working on. “I did not want to be left behind on this one,” he later wrote.

Bardeen and Brattain were taken aback. The fact that Shockley had been so secretive about his new idea—thus violating the code of sharing that was part of the Bell culture—upset them. Yet they could not help but be impressed by the simple beauty of Shockley’s approach.

After patent applications for both methods had been filed, the Bell Labs brass decided it was time to make the new device public. But first they needed a name for it. Internally it had been called a “semiconductor triode” and a “surface-state amplifier,” but those were not catchy enough names for an invention that, they correctly believed, would revolutionize the world. One day a colleague named John Pierce wandered into Brattain’s office. In addition to being a good engineer, he was a clever wordsmith who wrote science fiction under the pseudonym J. J. Coupling. Among his many quips were “Nature abhors a vacuum tube” and “After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy.” Brattain declared, “You’re just the man I want to see.” He posed the naming question, and after just a moment Pierce came up with a suggestion. Since the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.

On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.” That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age.

The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment, and Bill didn’t have anything to do with it.”

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