MICHAEL RIORDAN AND LILLIAN HODDESON
Crystal Fire
The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information
Age
An Excerpt, Part 2 of 3
Original URL: http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall98/riordan2.htm
DAWN OF AN AGE
William Shockley was extremely agitated. Speeding through
the frosty hills west of Newark on the morning of December 23,
1947, he hardly noticed the few vehicles on the narrow country
road leading to Bell Telephone Laboratories. His mind was on
other matters.
Arriving just after seven, Shockley parked his MG convertible
in the company lot, bounded up two flights of stairs, and rushed
through the deserted corridors to his office. That afternoon
his research team was to demonstrate a promising new electronic
device to his boss. He had to be ready. An amplifier based on
a semiconductor, he knew, could ignite a revolution. Lean and
hawk-nosed, his temples graying and his thinning hair slicked
back from a proud, jutting forehead, Shockley had dreamed of
inventing such a device for almost a decade. Now his dream was
about to come true.
About an hour later, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain pulled
up at this modern research campus in Murray Hill, New Jersey,
twenty miles from New York City. Members of Shockley's solid-state
physics group, they had made the crucial breakthrough a week
before. Using little more than a tiny, nondescript slab of the
element germanium, a thin plastic wedge, and a shiny strip of
gold foil, they had boosted an electrical signal almost a hundredfold.
Soft-spoken and cerebral, Bardeen had come up with the key
ideas, which were quickly and skillfully implemented by the genial
Brattain, a salty, silver-haired man who liked to tinker with
equipment almost as much as he loved to gab. Working shoulder
to shoulder for most of the prior month, day after day except
on Sundays, they had finally coaxed their curious-looking gadget
into operation.
That Tuesday morning, while Bardeen completed a few calculations
in his office, Brattain was over in his laboratory with a technician,
making last-minute checks on their amplifier. Around one edge
of a triangular plastic wedge, he had glued a small strip of
gold foil, which he carefully slit along this edge with a razor
blade. He then pressed both wedge and foil down into the dull-gray
germanium surface with a makeshift spring fashioned from a paper
clip. Less than an inch high, this delicate contraption was clamped
clumsily together by a U-shaped piece of plastic resting upright
on one of its two arms. Two copper wires soldered to edges of
the foil snaked off to batteries, transformers, an oscilloscope,
and other devices needed to power the gadget and assess its performance.
Occasionally, Brattain paused to light a cigarette and gaze
through blinds on the window of his clean, well-equipped lab.
Stroking his mustache, he looked out across a baseball diamond
on the spacious rural campus to a wooded ridge of the Watchung
Mountains worlds apart from the cramped, dusty laboratory he
had occupied in New York City before the war. Slate-colored clouds
stretched off to the horizon. A light rain began to fall.
At forty-five, Brattain had come a long way from his years
as a roughneck kid growing up in the Columbia River basin. As
a sharpshooting teenager, he helped his father grow corn and
raise cattle on the family homestead in Tonasket, Washington,
close to the Canadian border. "Following three horses and
a harrow in the dust," he often joked, "was what made
a physicist out of me."
Brattain's interest in the subject was sparked by two professors
at Whitman College, a small liberal-arts college in the southeastern
corner of the state. It carried him through graduate school at
Oregon and Minnesota to a job in 1929 at Bell Labs, where he
had remained happy to be working at the best industrial research
laboratory in the world.
Bardeen, a thirty-nine-year-old theoretical physicist, could
hardly have been more different. Often lost in thought, he came
across as very shy and self-absorbed. He was extremely parsimonious
with his words, parceling them out softly in a deliberate monotone
as if each were a precious gem never to be squandered. "Whispering
John" some of his friends called him. But whenever he spoke,
they listened. To many, he was an oracle.
Raised in a large academic family, the second son of the dean
of the University of Wisconsin medical school, Bardeen had been
intellectually precocious. He grew up among the ivied dorms and
the sprawling frat houses lining the shores of Lake Mendota near
downtown Madison, the state capital. Entering the university
at fifteen, he earned two degrees in electrical engineering and
worked a few years in industry before heading off to Princeton
in 1933 to pursue a Ph.D. in physics.
In the fall of 1945, Bardeen took a job at Bell Labs, then
winding down its wartime research program and gearing up for
an expected postwar boom in electronics. He initially shared
an office with Brattain, who had been working on semiconductors
since the early 1930s, and soon became intrigued by these curious
materials, whose electrical properties were just beginning to
be understood. Poles apart temperamentally, the two men became
fast friends, often playing a round of golf together at the local
country club on weekends.
Shortly after lunch that damp December day, Bardeen joined
Brattain in his laboratory. Outside, the rain had changed to
snow, which was beginning to accumulate. Shockley arrived about
ten minutes later, accompanied by his boss, acoustics expert
Harvey Fletcher, and Bell's research director, Ralph Bown a tall,
broad-shouldered man fond of expensive suits and fancy bow ties.
"The Brass," thought Bardeen a little contemptuously,
using a term he had picked up from wartime work with the Navy.
Certainly these two executives would appreciate the commercial
promise of this device. But could they really understand what
was going on inside that shiny slab of germanium? Shockley might
be comfortable rubbing elbows and bantering with the higher-ups,
but Bardeen would rather be working on the physics he loved.
After a few words of explanation, Brattain powered up his
equipment. The others watched the luminous spot that was racing
across the oscilloscope screen jump and fall abruptly as he switched
the odd contraption in and out of the circuit using a toggle
switch. From the height of the jump, they could easily tell it
was boosting the input signal many times whenever it was included
in the loop. And yet there wasn't a single vacuum tube in the
entire circuit!
Then, borrowing a page from the Bell history books, Brattain
spoke a few impromptu words into a microphone. They watched the
sudden look of surprise on Bown's bespectacled face as he reacted
to the sound of Brattain's gravelly voice booming in his ears
through the headphones. Bown passed them to Fletcher, who shook
his head in wonder shortly after putting them on.
For Bell Telephone Laboratories, it was an archetypal moment.
More than seventy years earlier, a similar event had occurred
in the attic of a boardinghouse in Boston, Massachusetts, when
Alexander Graham Bell uttered the words, "Mr. Watson, come
here. I want you."
1
DAWN OF AN AGE, continued, An Excerpt, Part 3 of 3
IN THE WEEKS that followed, however, Shockley was torn by
conflicting emotions. The invention of the transistor, as Bardeen
and Brattain's solid-state amplifier soon came to be called,
had been a "magnificent Christmas present" for his
group and especially for Bell Labs, which had staunchly supported
their basic research program. But he was chagrined to have had
no direct role in this crucial breakthrough. "My elation
with the group's success was tempered by not being one of the
inventors," he recalled many years later. "I experienced
frustration that my personal efforts, started more than eight
years before, had not resulted in a significant inventive contribution
of my own."
Growing up in Palo Alto and Hollywood, the only son of a well-to-do
mining engineer and his Stanford-educated wife, Bill Shockley
had been raised to consider himself special a leader of men,
not a follower. His interest in science was stimulated during
his boyhood by a Stanford professor who lived in the neighborhood.
It flowered at Cal Tech, where he majored in physics before heading
east in 1932 to seek a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. There he dived headlong into the Wonderland world
of quantum mechanics, where particles behave like waves and waves
like particles, and began to explore how streams of electrons
trickle through crystalline materials such as ordinary table
salt. Four years later, when Bell Labs lifted its Depression-era
freeze on new employees, the cocky young Californian was the
first new physicist hired.
With the encouragement of Mervin Kelly, then Bell's research
director, Shockley began seeking ways to fashion a rugged solid-state
device to replace the balky, unreliable switches and amplifiers
commonly used in phone equipment. His familiarity with the weird
quantum world gave him a decided advantage in this quest. In
late 1939 he thought he had come up with a good idea to stick
a tiny bit of weathered copper screen inside a piece of semiconductor.
Although skeptical, Brattain helped him build this crude device
early the next year. It proved a complete failure.
Far better insight into the subtleties of solids was needed
and much purer semiconductor materials, too. World War II interrupted
Shockley's efforts, but wartime research set the stage for major
breakthroughs in electronics and communications once the war
ended. Stepping in as Bell Labs vice president, Kelly recognized
these unique opportunities and organized a solid-state physics
group, installing his ambitious protégé as its
co-leader.
Soon after returning to the Labs in early 1945, Shockley came
up with another design for a semiconductor amplifier. Again,
it didn't work. And he couldn't understand why. Discouraged,
he turned to other projects, leaving the conundrum to Bardeen
and Brattain. In the course of their research, which took almost
two years, they stumbled upon a different and successful way
to make such an amplifier.
Their invention quickly spurred Shockley into a bout of feverish
activity. Galled at being upstaged, he could think of little
else besides semiconductors for over a month. Almost every moment
of free time he spent on trying to design an even better solid-state
amplifier, one that would be easier to manufacture and use. Instead
of whooping it up with other scientists and engineers while attending
two conferences in Chicago, he spent New Year's Eve cooped up
in his hotel room with a pad and a few pencils, working into
the early morning hours on yet another of his ideas.
By late January 1948 Shockley had figured out the important
details of his own design, filling page after page of his lab
notebook. His approach would use nothing but a small strip of
semiconductor material silicon or germanium with three wires
attached, one at each end and one in the middle. He eliminated
the delicate "point contacts" of Bardeen and Brattain's
unwieldy contraption (the edges of the slit gold foil wrapped
around the plastic wedge). Those, he figured, would make manufacturing
difficult and lead to quirky performance. Based on boundaries
or "junctions" to be established within the
semiconductor material itself, his amplifier should be much easier
to mass-produce and far more reliable.
But it took more than two years before other Bell scientists
perfected the techniques needed to grow germanium crystals with
the right characteristics to act as transistors and amplify electrical
signals. And not for a few more years could such "junction
transistors" be produced in quantity. Meanwhile, Bell engineers
plodded ahead, developing point-contact transistors based on
Bardeen and Brattain's ungainly invention. By the middle of that
decade, millions of dollars in new equipment based on this device
was about to enter the telephone system.
Still, Shockley had faith that his junction approach would
eventually win out. He had a brute confidence in the superiority
of his ideas. And rarely did he miss an opportunity to tell Bardeen
and Brattain, whose relationship with their abrasive boss rapidly
soured. In a silent rage, Bardeen left Bell Labs in 1951 for
an academic post at the University of Illinois. Brattain quietly
got himself reassigned elsewhere within the labs, where he could
pursue research on his own. The three men crossed paths again
in Stockholm, where they shared the 1956 Nobel prize in physics
for their invention of the transistor. The tension eased a bit
after that but not much.
BY THE MID-1950S physicists and electrical engineers may
have recognized the transistor's significance, but the general
public was still almost completely oblivious. The millions of
radios, television sets, and other electronic devices produced
every year by such grayflannel giants of American industry as
General Electric, Philco, RCA, and Zenith came in large, clunky
boxes powered by balky vacuum tubes that took a minute or so
to warm up before anything could happen. In 1954 the transistor
was largely perceived as an expensive laboratory curiosity with
only a few specialized applications such as hearing aids and
military communications.
But that year things started to change dramatically. A small,
innovative Dallas company began producing junction transistors
for portable radios, which hit U.S. stores at $49.95. Texas Instruments
curiously abandoned this market, only to see it cornered by a
tiny, little-known Japanese company called Sony. Transistor radios
you could carry around in your shirt pocket soon became a minor
status symbol for teenagers in the suburbs sprawling across the
American landscape. After Sony started manufacturing TV sets
powered by transistors in the 1960s, U.S. leadership in consumer
electronics began to wane.
Vast fortunes would eventually be made in an obscure valley
south of San Francisco then filled with apricot orchards. In
1955 Shockley left Bell Labs for California, intent on making
the millions he thought he deserved, founding the first semiconductor
company in the valley. He lured top-notch scientists and engineers
away from Bell and other companies, ambitious men like himself
who soon jumped ship to start their own firms. What became famous
around the world as Silicon Valley began with Shockley Semiconductor
Laboratory, the progenitor of hundreds of companies like it,
many of them far more successful.
The transistor has indeed proved to be what Shockley so presciently
called the "nerve cell" of the Information Age. Hardly
a unit of electronic equipment can be made today without it.
Many thousands and even millions of them are routinely packed
with other microscopic specks onto slim crystalline slivers of
silicon called microprocessors, better known as microchips. By
1961 transistors were the foundation of a billion-dollar semiconductor
industry whose sales were doubling almost every year. Over three
decades later, the computing power that had once required rooms
full of bulky electronic equipment is now easily loaded into
units that can sit on a desktop, be carried in a briefcase, or
even rest in the palm of one's hand. Words, numbers, and images
flash around the globe almost instantaneously via transistor-powered
satellites, fiber-optic networks, cellular phones, and telefax
machines. Through their landmark efforts, Bardeen, Brattain,
and Shockley had struck the first glowing sparks of a great technological
fire that has raged through the rest of the century and shows
little sign of abating. Cheap, portable, and reliable equipment
based on transistors can now be found in almost every village
and hamlet in the world. This tiny invention has made the world
a far smaller and more intimate place than ever before.
NOBODY COULD HAVE forseen the coming revolution when Ralph
Bown announced the new invention on June 30, 1948, at a press
conference held in the aging Bell Labs headquarters on West Street,
facing the Hudson River opposite the bustling Hoboken Ferry.
"We have called it the Transistor," he began, slowly
spelling out the name, "because it is a resistor or semiconductor
device which can amplify electrical signals as they are transferred
through it." Comparing it to the bulky vacuum tubes that
served this purpose in virtually every electrical circuit of
the day, he told reporters that the transistor could accomplish
the very same feats and do them much better, wasting far less
power.
But the press paid little attention to the small cylinder
with two flimsy wires poking out of it that was being demonstrated
by Bown and his staff that sweltering summer day. None of the
reporters suspected that the physical process silently going
on inside this innocuous-looking metal tube, hardly bigger than
the rubber erasers on the ends of their pencils, would utterly
transform their world.
Editors at the New York Times were intrigued enough
to mention the breakthrough in the July 1 issue, but they buried
the story on page 46 in "The News of Radio." After
noting that Our Miss Brooks would replace the regular
CBS Monday-evening program Radio Theatre that summer,
they devoted a few paragraphs to the new amplifier.
"A device called a transistor, which has several applications
in radio where a vacuum tube ordinarily is employed, was demonstrated
for the first time yesterday at Bell Telephone Laboratories,"
began the piece, noting that it had been employed in a radio
receiver, a telephone system, and a television set. "In
the shape of a small metal cylinder about a half-inch long, the
transistor contains no vacuum, grid, plate or glass envelope
to keep the air away," the column continued. "Its action
is instantaneous, there being no warm-up delay since no heat
is developed as in a vacuum tube."
Perhaps too much other news was breaking that sultry Thursday
morning. Turnstiles on the New York subway system, which until
midnight had always droned to the dull clatter of nickels, now
marched only to the music of dimes. Subway commuters responded
with resignation. Idlewild Airport opened for business the previous
day in the swampy meadowlands just east of Brooklyn, supplanting
La Guardia as New York's principal destination for international
flights. And the hated Red Sox had beaten the world-champion
Yankees 7 to 3.
Earlier that week, the gathering clouds of the Cold War had
darkened dramatically over Europe after Soviet occupation forces
in eastern Germany refused to allow Allied convoys to carry any
more supplies into West Berlin. The United States and Britain
responded to this blockade with a massive airlift. Hundreds of
transport planes brought the thousands of tons of food and fuel
needed daily by the more than 2 million trapped citizens. All
eyes were on Berlin. "The incessant roar of the planes that
typical and terrible 20th Century sound, a voice of cold, mechanized
anger filled every ear in the city," reported Time.
An empire that soon encompassed nearly half the world's population
seemed awfully menacing that week to a continent weary of war.
To almost everyone who knew about it, including its two inventors,
the transistor was just a compact, efficient, rugged replacement
for vacuum tubes. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain foresaw what a
crucial role it was about to play in computers, although Shockley
had an inkling. In the postwar years electronic digital computers,
which could then be counted on the fingers of a single hand,
occupied large rooms and required teams of watchful attendants
to replace the burned-out elements among their thousands of overheated
vacuum tubes. Only the armed forces, the federal government,
and major corporations could afford to build and operate such
gargantuan, power-hungry devices.
Five decades later the same computing power is easily crammed
inside a pocket calculator costing around $10, thanks largely
to microchips and the transistors on which they are based. For
the amplifying action discovered at Bell Labs in 19471948
actually takes place in just a microscopic sliver of semiconductor
material and in stark contrast to vacuum tubes produces almost
no wasted heat. Thus the transistor has lent itself readily to
the relentless miniaturization and the fantastic cost reductions
that have put digital computers at almost everybody's fingertips.
Without the transistor, the personal computer would have been
inconceivable, and the Information Age it spawned could never
have happened. Linked to a global communications network that
has itself undergone a radical transformation due to transistors,
computers are now revolutionizing the ways we obtain and share
information. Whereas our parents learned about the world by reading
newspapers and magazines or by listening to the baritone voice
of Edward R. Murrow on their radios, we can now access far more
information at the click of a mouse and from a far greater variety
of sources. Or we witness earthshaking events like the fall of
the Soviet Union amid the comfort of our living rooms, often
the moment they occur and without interpretation.
While Russia is no longer the looming menace it was during
the Cold War, nations that have embraced the new information
technologies based on transistors and microchips have flourished.
Japan and its retinue of developing East Asian countries increasingly
set the world's communications standards, manufacturing much
of the necessary equipment. Television signals penetrate an ever-growing
fraction of the globe via satellite. Banks exchange money via
rivers of ones and zeroes flashing through electronic networks
all around the world. And boy meets girl over the Internet.
No doubt the birth of a revolutionary artifact often goes
unnoticed amid the clamor of daily events. In half a century's
time, the transistor, whose modest role is to amplify electrical
signals, has redefined the meaning of power, which today is based
as much upon the control and exchange of information as it is
on iron or oil. The throbbing heart of this sweeping global transformation
is the tiny solid-state amplifier invented by Bardeen, Brattain,
and Shockley. The crystal fire they ignited during those anxious
postwar years has radically reshaped the world and the way its
inhabitants now go about their daily lives.
MICHAEL RIORDAN AND LILLIAN HODDESON
