Crystal Fire.pdf

Crystal Fire: The Invention, Development and Impact of the Transistor Adapted from Chapter 1 of Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age, by Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, published in 1997 by W. W. Norton Company. Michael Riordan, University of California, Santa Cruz and Lillian Hoddeson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign In mid-December 1947 John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, physicists at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, solved a problem that had been vexing their boss William Shockley for nearly a decade. They succeeded in making a solid-state amplifier from germanium. A close cousin of silicon, this semiconductor element had been employed in crystal rectifiers at the heart of radar receivers during World War II. Bardeen and Brattain’s revolutionary device consisted of two closely spaced metal points pressing onto a thin sliver of high-purity germanium about the size of a small fingernail, to the back of which was attached a third lead. A positive bias of a few volts on one point dramatically increased the conductivity just beneath the other one, boosting the current through it by almost a hundredfold. On the afternoon of December 23, Bardeen and Brattain were scheduled to demonstrate their promising new electronic device to executives at Bell Labs. Soft -spoken and cerebral, Bardeen had come up with the key ideas for this gizmo, which Brattain quickly and skillfully implemented. Working shoulder-to-shoulder for most of the prior month, day after day except on Sundays, they had finally gotten their Rube Goldberg contraption to work as intended. [Riordan and Hoddeson, 1997b;Hoddeson and Daitch, 2001] That morning, while Bardeen completed a few calculations, Brattain was in his laboratory making last-minute checks. Around one edge of a triangular plastic wedge, he had glued a small strip of gold foil, which he carefully slit along this edge with a razor blade. He then pressed both wedge and foil