Fifty years of transistor action
Robert W. Keyes · Physics World · 1997
Back in 1940, when I was at school, information was something found in books. The seeds of change germinated at the end of the Second World War. The first electronic computer, called ENIAC, came into being in 1946, and the invention of the transistor in 1947 opened the way to making computers accessible, familiar and powerful. Walter Brattain, John Bardeen and William Shockley, who discovered transistor action at Bell Laboratories in December 1947, earned the 1956 Nobel Prize for Physics for the work. Crystal Fire is an engrossing story of the invention and formative days of the transistor. It is a noteworthy contribution to the 50th anniversary of the origins of the era of electronic information.