by WALTER ISAACSON
Bell Labs technicians prepare the Telstar 1 communications satellite before its launching in 1962. PHOTO/AT&T Archives and History Center/The New York Times
In 1909, top executives at AT&T decided to commit themselves to a challenge: building a transcontinental phone line that could connect a call between New York and San Francisco. The problem was one that required not just engineering skill but advances in pure science. They needed, among other things, to create a repeater or amplifier for the electric signals so that they would not attenuate after a few miles. Thus was the seed planted for a new collaborative industrial organization — teaming up theoreticians, experimentalists, material scientists, metallurgists, engineers and even telephone pole climbers — that eventually became Bell Labs. Jointly owned by AT&T and its affiliated equipment maker, Western Electric, Bell Labs went on to invent the transistor and make major contributions to the field of lasers and cellular telephony.
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Having failed with copper oxide, the team tried two other semiconducting materials, silicon and germanium. By December 1947, they had rigged up thin slices of those materials with a wire tipped by a gold-foil point and were able to show that the contraption could act as an amplifier. It also proved able to serve as an electronic switch and do everything a vacuum tube could do at a fraction of the size and electricity use. After polling 31 members of the Bell Labs staff, they decided to name the new device a “transistor.” Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain would share the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery.
The New York Times for more
(thanks to Salim Amersi)