The invention of the transistor
Michael Riordan, Lillian Hartmann Hoddeson, Conyers Herring · Reviews of Modern Physics · 1999
Arguably the most important invention of the past century, the transistor is often cited as the exemplar of how scientific research can lead to useful commercial products. Emerging in 1947 from a Bell Telephone Laboratories program of basic research on the physics of solids, it began to replace vacuum tubes in the 1950s and eventually spawned the integrated circuit and microprocessor—the heart of a semiconductor industry now generating annual sales of more than $150 billion. These solid-state electronic devices are what have put computers in our laps and on desktops and permitted them to communicate with each other over telephone networks around the globe. The transistor has aptly been called the “nerve cell” of the Information Age.