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Who invented the transistor?

91 points by todsacerdoti

by Aloha

9 subcomments

I think a valid part of the question of who invented something is "who built the first working device" - describing something in theory and building working device are not the same thing.
AG Bell wasn't the first one to conceptually invent the telephone, he was among the first (along with Elisha Gray) in making practical working telephone and later a practical working telephone system.

by Isamu

2 subcomments

What’s up with the ending that makes no sense?
>Where are the physical limits? According to Bremermann (1982), a computer of 1 kg of mass and 1 liter of volume can execute at most 1051 operations per second on at most 1032 bits. The trend above will hit the Bremermann limit roughly 25 decades after Z3, circa 2200. However, since there are only 2 x 1030 kg of mass in the solar system, the trend is bound to break within a few centuries, since the speed of light will greatly limit the acquisition of additional mass
They shift from talking about the transistor density to somehow considering a supermassive construct. Reminds me of LLM mashups.

by BirAdam

0 subcomment

Is there any evidence that Shockley was aware of Lilienfeld’s FET? I mean, given Shockley’s general disposition, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d stolen things, but we have his early prototypes and such to back up his claim of invention. The next step is to prove a through line to the modern era.
The Sumerians knew geometry, trigonometry, and other advanced mathematics. That knowledge perished, and then the Greeks rediscovered things. The Greeks then get credit because their work is what paved the way for all of us today. The same would apply to Shockley. If Lilienfeld’s work didn’t make it to the USA in time to have had an effect on development in the valley, then it doesn’t really matter for the US industry.

by cpldcpu

0 subcomment

This lists many transistor patents from oldest to newest.
https://patents.google.com/?q=(H03F3%2f16)&sort=old
The Matare/Welker Patent is missing though
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2673948A/en.541
The entire debate is tiring. It would be better if these reviews would put the actual device physics of the different concepts into context.
Is there any report of a reproduction of the device proposed by Lilienfeld in his patents? If he managed to make functional devices back then, it should be possible today? (Note: Cu2S is not a very well controllable semiconductor...)
Edit:
Gemini Deep Research summary here, its quite informative: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jE0wQVeWP9Eiybh_C6zMKeZ5...
Also specifically on Cu based TFT: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_B2x2gBPKgGFVgJyQ0qzPdI4...
From the second document: "The primary obstacle for $Cu_2S$ TFTs is degeneracy. Spontaneous copper vacancies form with negligible energy cost in the sulfur lattice. As a result, stoichiometric $Cu_2S$ is thermodynamically unstable in air, rapidly oxidizing or losing copper to form substoichiometric phases ($Cu_{2-x}S$) with hole concentrations exceeding $10^{20}-10^{21} \text{ cm}^{-3}$."
This explains why there are zero reproductions of Lilienfelds devices. It should be noted that Lilienfeld is one of the inventors of electrolytic capacitors and did therefore know where well how to create extremely thin insulating layers as needed for TFTs. It is not impossible to assume that he could have used other semiconductors (e.g. CdS) with his concept. However, the patents seems to specifically mention Cu2S, which does not yield functional TFTs.

by econ

0 subcomment

In his notes from November 1, 1913 Thomas Henry Moray described what later would be called the Moray valve. It used germanium.

by adrian_b

0 subcomment

The term "transistor" is much too vague, so the question "who invented the transistor" is ill posed.
There are different kinds of transistors, which use different principles for controlling electrical currents, and which have been invented by different people at different times.
Lilienfeld has invented 2 kinds of transistors: MESFETs (metal-semiconductor field-effect transistors) and depletion-mode MOSFETs (metal-insulator-semiconductor field-effect transistors) (US patents 1,745,175 and 1,900,018). Of these 2 kinds of transistors, the second is rarely used today, while the first is used mostly in special applications for discrete power devices.
The parent article is very wrong in claiming that the transistors invented by Lilienfeld are those that are most frequently used today, which are the enhancement-mode MOSFETs, which have a very different structure and for which much less of the semiconductor materials are suitable than for the simpler transistors invented by Lilienfeld.
The enhancement-mode MOSFET has been invented in 1960 by Martin M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng from Bell Laboratories (US patents 3,206,670 and 3,102,230).
Bardeen and Brattain have discovered the point-contact transistor, which had been used only for a few years before becoming completely obsolete, but which was the first kind of transistor offered as a commercial product.
William Shockley has invented 2 kinds of transistors, which have been very important and which remain the best in some special applications, the bipolar junction transistor (BJT) and the junction field-effect transistor (JFET) (US patents 2,569,347 and 2,744,970). William Shockley has also the huge merit of developing a theory of the physics of semiconductor materials which allowed everybody to design transistors and many other kinds of semiconductor devices.
Therefore the 3 Nobel winners have invented together 3 kinds of transistors and they are rightly called inventors of some of the kinds of transistors, i.e. point-contact, BJT and JFET.
Lilienfeld was the first who conceived some possible structures for a triode that uses a semiconductor instead of vacuum or gas. This was a great advance, but this still resulted logically from the prior knowledge that one can make diodes using either vacuum or gas or a semiconductor, and one can make triodes using either vacuum or gas. Thus he attempted to fill the missing combination.
The Bell Laboratories are truly guilty of trying to hide the fact that their post-war research on making a semiconductor triode had indeed started with the purpose of making alternatives to the devices invented by Lilienfeld, of which they were well aware. However, they eventually invented 4 different kinds of transistors, all of which had structures and principles of operation very different from the 2 Lilienfeld transistors, even if all 6 kinds can be considered as variants of semiconductor triodes.
The first 3 kinds of transistors that have been invented, the 2 Lilienfeld transistors and the point-contact transistor of Bardeen and Brattain, can be made using pieces of a homogeneous semiconductor material. This is why they have been discovered first.
The next 3 kinds of transistors, invented by Shockley and by Atalla with Kahng, contain P-N junctions, so they were invented only after William Shockley had developed the theory of the P-N junctions.

by Glawen

0 subcomment

When you come in the UK as a continental european (french for that matter), you notice you're inundated with tons of trivia of how great british inventors are, and how many things they invented/discovered. They even make TV shows about it. Nothing like this exists in France and people have no clue about who invented stuff, nor do they care.
Now with internet, where truth is supposedly coming from english world, there are plenty of opportunities to rewrite history 1984 style. It's really damning now with AI auto translating every english to your local language.

by anonnon

0 subcomment

Shockley developed the first working bipolar junction transistor, which was the first transistor to ever enter mass production, which is why he's credited for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_junction_transistor
Though I'm unsure of the author's motivations, there's certainly a tendency with Shockley similar to what one sees with Hitler, where people will occasionally question or cast doubt on Hitler's WWI service record--which was by all accounts exemplary. (I.e., Bad Guy can't also possibly have done Good Thing.)

by utopiah

0 subcomment

It's going to be Schmidhuber, isn't it?! /s

by ur-whale

4 subcomments

I wish Jürgen Schmidhuber would switch back to actually doing AI research instead of having become completely obsessed with "who invented what" because he feels like he has somehow been academically "robbed" at some point in his career.
He's now officially become a full-blown pariah in the AI world, most relevant people in the space running away at the first sight of his goatee at conferences, knowing exactly the kind of complete and utter crank he's become.

by grunder_advice

4 subcomments

I personally detest the way we sanctify some sole individuals while forgetting the bulk of the community. I don't care who published the first patent for the transistor. He or She certainly cannot be credited for all the work that has been put into it so that I can today use a hand held device to post this comment.

by amarant

1 subcomments

Oskar Heil is a curious name, especially considering where and when he was from

by dboreham

1 subcomments

This is a good piece of writing that nicely illustrates how what we perceive as "who invented something" is mostly a function of money and politics.

by newsoftheday

3 subcomments

I typed this into Gemini, "who invented the transistor?" and it correctly cites "John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at Bell Telephone Laboratories in December 1947".