#First transistor how to
The first electronic products were made from individual transistors, but before long engineers learnt how to integrate several simultaneously, giving birth to the first integrated circuit (IC) in 1957.
The launch of Sputnik by the USSR in 1957 spurred the USA to turn to the semiconductor industry to help them compete in the space race Determined to catch up and surpass Soviet technology, the US government turned to the semiconductor industry to build the control and guidance computers of sufficient complexity that would fit into a rocket of practical size and weight. It was another event, however, that proved the tipping point for computers, namely the Soviet Union’s launch of the world’s first satellite (Sputnik 1) on 4 October 1957. Watson, Jr., head of IBM, who used it to goad his reluctant engineers to embrace the new technology to build computers with transistors.
The importance of the TR-1 was especially clear to Thomas J. Its 1957 follow-up product, under the company name now changed to Sony ‘so Americans could pronounce it’, was marketed as “the shirt pocket size smallest transistorized radio in the world”, saw the firm equip all their salesmen with oversized pocket shirts. The Japanese company, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (Totsuko) also recognised the transistor radio’s potential and entered the market in 1956 with a competitive device that quickly became the company’s first big product success, leading to its eventual global consumer electronics domination. Its small size, battery operation and portability enabled people who had previously been denied access to outside information to have front row seats in external affairs. Possibly the radio’s most important social contribution was that it opened the floodgates of global information, decades before the information age became vogue. With music now in their pocket, teenagers could listen out of earshot of their disapproving parents, something the inventors had not anticipated nor were pleased about! When Regency co-founder John Pies’ children became teenagers, it was common to hear “turn that music down” barked in the Pies household, whilst Walter Brattain, one of the transistor co-inventors, often lamented that his only regret was that it stimulated rock and roll. In 1954, Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ hit the charts, along with Elvis Presley’s first record, ‘That’s All Right Mama’. The timing was also right from a social point of view. Prior to the transistor the only alternative to its current regulation and switching functions was the vacuum tube (thermionic valve), which could only be miniaturized to a certain extent and wasted a lot of energy in the form of heat.įirst shown to the world on 23 December 1947, no one really knew what to do with the invention and it was only when engineers started to appreciate that it would enable products to be built smaller, more reliably and with less power consumption that it moved from a laboratory curiosity to its first application – a hearing aid built by the US firm Sonotone in December 1952. This was perhaps the most important electronics event of the 20th century, as it later made possible the integrated circuit (IC) and microprocessor that are the basis of modern electronics.
The first transistor was invented at Bell Labs, New Jersey, USA on 16 December 1947 by William Shockley (seated below at Brattain’s laboratory bench), John Bardeen (left) and Walter Brattain (right). Transistors are the unsung hero of the internet age yet few people outside the semiconductor industry are aware they exist.