95. Transistor
It changed everything except us.
Four notes on the transistor:
1. Its influence cannot be overstated. Nobody could have imagined how it would transform human life. Its announcement in the New York Times was brief, buried deep in the paper. Yet every electronic experience passes through transistors, tiny switches that turn electricity on and off. Today, a single chip contains hundreds of billions of them.
2. It all came from quantum mechanics. Solid matter turned out to be far stranger than it appears. We knew that metal conducted electricity, but quantum mechanics in the 1920s revealed that certain crystals—especially silicon—could be made to control electricity itself. The digital age emerged from manipulating those crystals at the quantum level.
3. It was shared generously. Management at Bell Labs was afraid that the military would classify the transistor, or that the Justice Department would begin antitrust proceedings. Their response was strategic preemptive openness—they created a liberal licensing program, seeding the information so widely and fast that classification became moot. For $25,000, companies including GE, RCA, and then-small firms like Sony and Texas Instruments received a license and a crash course.
4. Human egos got in the way. The history of the transistor is soaked with resentment and rivalry. William Shockley quit Bell Labs to found a rival outfit, which itself lost eight young scientists, the “traitorous eight,” who founded Fairchild Semiconductor—the seed of Silicon Valley. New laws of matter do not imply new laws of human nature. The transistor changed everything except us.
Special thanks to Peter Wallace for suggesting the transistor.
Links:
Transistorized! - PBS, 1999: “The story of clashing egos and top secret research.”
1952: Bell Labs Licenses Transistor Technology – Computer History Museum
“The News of Radio” – New York Times, July 1, 1948, p. 46, column 3.
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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.
I’m looking for ideas for this series — have something you’d like me to consider for inclusion? Please feel free to leave a comment!
Ah, yes, the nature of the human being...a constant entanglement of controlling situations....thank you
So true.