The First Transistors

Comments · 716

• MA

  @matt4054yt · 2 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzy_KOBddRA&amp;t=627">10:27</a> &quot;We discovered something important today&quot; easily qualifies as understatement of the century, possibly the millenium

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• TH

  @TheBlackBuddha17 · 2 years ago

  I LOVE THE ASAINOMETRY YOUTUBE CHANNEL!!!

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• JA

  @jameslovelady7751 · 2 months ago

  I was a vacuum tube nerd in 1947. I remember reading about the point contact transistor in the &nbsp;Radio News magazine. Later I bought 2 CK722 transistors for $4,50 apiece (over $50 in 2026 dollars) and promptly destroyed them,not understanding the difference from tubes.

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• BO

  @Bob.martens · 2 years ago

  The amount of transistors this videosignal has gone trough from inception to my viewing is astronomical.

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• EU

  @euprefiroassim · 11 days ago

  The invention of the transistor is on a par with the mastery of fire.

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• CH

  @chubaka_4400 · 2 years ago (edited)

  There is also another interesting documentary about how Sony tried to recreate the transistor because Japan was not allowed to see any details after the war or I think the parts were too expensive to import from US, so they had to grow the crystals in buckets and experiment from scratch. &nbsp;Back then, Sony was just 2 guys and completely unknown but they were the first to successfully recreate the transistor and create the first portable radio in Japan.

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• MI

  @mickolesmana5899 · 2 years ago

  after watching Nakamura LED discovery, compare to Nichia, AT&amp;T seems like a good company not only promoting Shockly, Brattain, and Bardeen but also give them a credit as a leader in theory of transistor and semiconductor

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• DO

  @douglaswatters7303 · 2 years ago

  Blows my mind that no transistor existed 76 years ago. I know people older than that. The house I grew up in was built before the transistor.

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• TH

  @thefloop2813 · 2 years ago

  &quot;This is not a scientific diagram. Please don&apos;t come at me&quot;<br><br>Subscribed.

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• HE

  @HennerZeller · 2 years ago

  Looking at the physical layout of the triangular shape with the two points at the end, and seeing the sketch at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzy_KOBddRA&amp;t=834">13:54</a> ... Just NOW it becomes clear to me why the transistor symbol is the way it is. After I&apos;ve played with Transistors for the last 40 years. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/til">#TIL</a>

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• GE

  @georgegonzalez2476 · 2 years ago

  There were a few other weird twists to the transistor story. &nbsp;A guy had something that acted like a transistor back in 1925 but didn&apos;t pursue the concept.<br><br>The first transistors from Bell Labs were made mostly by accident, not to any specific theory. &nbsp;They put excess current into two of the point-contacts, which heated up the germanium around the contacts and by pure accident, created regions of varying plus and minus doping. &nbsp;Those transistors were very unpredictable and noisy.<br><br>They came really close to making a field-effect transistor but not quite. &nbsp; It wasn&apos;t like almost ten years later that the very different FET device was mastered.<br><br>Philco developed the surface-barrier transistor, a very high speed (for the time) but very fragile transistor. &nbsp;They cornered the market for very high speed transistors. &nbsp;They even built a $40 million special automated factory to make them. &nbsp; The plan was to sell the transistors for $35 to the military, maybe $5 for consumer transistor radios. &nbsp; &nbsp;The transistors were &quot;fast&quot; for their time, capable of 20 to 50 MHz operation, but at extremely low power levels, like 50 milliwatts tops. &nbsp; &nbsp; Unfortunately for them, the whole process was obsoleted by the much faster and rugged Fairchild silicon planar process by 1960.

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• WB

  @wbeaty · 2 years ago (edited)

  Transistors were analogous to carbon-filament bulbs. &nbsp; Bell Labs did not invent the first transistor, or even the practical transistor. &nbsp;Instead, they only had another practical transistor besides the earlier FETs of the 1920s, but they also had Shockley&apos;s new semiconductor physics, and that made all the difference.<br>Before their Bipolar Transistor breakthrough, Bell Labs had been trying to patent the FET, but hit a wall, because J.E. Lilienfeld already had working MOSFETs twenty years earlier, all covered by multiple patents. &nbsp; It was Lilienfeld, not Shockley, who applied e-fields to thin conductive films, and observed conductivity-modulation, with, as Bell Lab later said, &quot;useful gain.&quot; &nbsp;An eyewitness even reported that Lilienfeld was showing around a 4-transistor radio to various manufacturers in the 1930s. &nbsp;The Bell Labs project even included an attempt to duplicate Lilienfeld&apos;s transistors, and they succeeded at this, but kept very quiet about it. &nbsp;(When they published the first BJT paper, they simultaneously published the results of testing the Lilienfeld FET, but without revealing this, in that &quot;current modulation&quot; paper. &nbsp; Also, Bell Labs people constantly stated that Lilienfeld was a theorist who never built the FETs in his patents. &nbsp;(They knew this how?) &nbsp;No, Lilienfeld was an experimentalist, with no semiconductor theory, had built an entire transistor radio receiver, even patenting it, and besides, Bell had replicated successful Lilienfeld FETs, even though they concealed this fact when publishing the results! )<br><br>Because of decades-old prior art, they couldn&apos;t patent anything involving FETs, and besides, old FET patents were now in public-domain, impossible for anyone to own the invention. &nbsp;They were stuck. &nbsp;Transistors couldn&apos;t be a money-making product. &nbsp;Fortunately for them, their invention of the BJT broke this jam. &nbsp; But we&apos;d never know all of this dirty back-story, if we listen only to Bell Labs, just as we&apos;d never hear about all the earlier incandescent light bulbs if we only listen to GE and Thomas Edison. &nbsp;(Heh, DO NOT LOOK AT THE LILIENFELD MOSFET BEHIND THE CURTAIN! &nbsp;IT WILL ONLY CONFUSE YOU!)<br><br><br>History really really really is written by the winners (didn&apos;t we already know this? &nbsp;Or do we only give it lip-service, while disbelieving?) &nbsp;We&apos;re only taught a dishonest version of tech-breakthroughs, particularly when it involves large corporations (Note well that Bell Labs is a business, and so expected to tell lies constantly, if it involves invention priority and corporate propaganda.)<br><br>Westinghouse, the winner of the AC/DC battle, lit the entire Chicago worlds fair with tens of thousands of non-Edison light bulbs, after underbidding Edison on the contract. &nbsp;The earlier Sawyer-Mann carbon-filament bulb had been a failure: short operating lifetime, and a glued stopper to allow filaments to be replaced. &nbsp;But they worked well enough for use at the world&apos;s fair, with many hundreds of workers swapping out the constant stream of dead bulbs.<br>.

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