19481776 Club
Shockley files the patent for a transistor built in three days; no filament, no glow, no tube
The Bell Labs physicist's "sandwich" of doped semiconductor layers can amplify electrical signals in a package far smaller and sturdier than any vacuum tube.
Three years after the end of World War II, Bell Labs was racing to replace the fragile, power-hungry vacuum tube with something smaller and more reliable. On June 26, 1948, physicist William Shockley filed the patent for his grown-junction transistor — a "sandwich" of differently doped semiconductor layers that could amplify electrical signals without a single glowing filament. The design, conceived just three days earlier, became the blueprint for most transistors built through the 1960s and set the stage for every pocket-sized device that followed…
