The First Transistors

Links:

[mattyt]

10:27 "We discovered something important today" easily qualifies as understatement of the century, possibly the millenium

[TheBlackBuddha]

I LOVE THE ASAINOMETRY YOUTUBE CHANNEL!!!

[Bob.martens]

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

[artmaknev]

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. 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.

[mickolesmana]

after watching Nakamura LED discovery, compare to Nichia, AT&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

[thefloop]

"This is not a scientific diagram. Please don't come at me"

Subscribed.

[georgegonzalez]

There were a few other weird twists to the transistor story. A guy had something that acted like a transistor back in 1925 but didn't pursue the concept.

The first transistors from Bell Labs were made mostly by accident, not to any specific theory. 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. Those transistors were very unpredictable and noisy.

They came really close to making a field-effect transistor but not quite. It wasn't like almost ten years later that the very different FET device was mastered.

Philco developed the surface-barrier transistor, a very high speed (for the time) but very fragile transistor. They cornered the market for very high speed transistors. They even built a $40 million special automated factory to make them. The plan was to sell the transistors for $35 to the military, maybe $5 for consumer transistor radios. The transistors were "fast" for their time, capable of 20 to 50 MHz operation, but at extremely low power levels, like 50 milliwatts tops. Unfortunately for them, the whole process was obsoleted by the much faster and rugged Fairchild silicon planar process by 1960.

[thesolderman]

@16:29 together with the opening shot until @00:33, you really can see where the bipolar Transistor Symbol (still in use today for NPN or PNP) literally evolved from the reality of these first transistors. A triangles tip is pressed on a base of semiconductor material below it. The triangle has (goldfoil) contacts for emitter and collector on each side, in an angle of 90 degrees between them, both 45 degrees raised from the ground. The base of the Transistor, modulating the Signals between emitter and collector tips is down below this triangles tip, just like the connector for a base of a transistor, still used in today's schematics. (I'm working with this stuff for over 40 years now and never saw it that way, that the base was historical the big chunky thing, but it was like this only in the first Labs, not anymore in mass manufacturing containing a very thin layered sandwich with a plastic housing around it.)

[rayoflight]

You know the rest.
Shockley hired the best physicists. They soon were tired of Shockley eccentricities; one of those, i.e. giving them their salary thru the post, upset eight of them (including Moore and Noyce). So those eight bright mind left Shockley and formed Fairchild Semiconductor...

[joshuagivans]

As a studying Electrical Engineer the context this brings to my studies is beyond words. Thank you for the work and love you put into these videos.

[vpilot]

I remember in the early 1950's there were articles on how you could make transistors using germanium diodes (you could not buy transistors a that time).

My dad told me that researchers from Bell Labs gave a presentation on transistors at the IEE in London. At the end of their presentation, they threw a handful of transistors into the audience who then scrabbled around on the floor trying to grab one.

He said that at the GPO Dollis Hill lab, they received their first transistor. They carefully mounted it in a clamp, ready to make measurements on the device. But they had crushed it in the clamp.

Somewhere in a drawer, I have a GET-1 point contact transistor, GEC's first commercially sold transistor.

[tomschmidt]

As a US baby boomer I always find these technical history lessons fascinating. I graduated 8th grade in 1961 and for graduation my parents bought me a Motorola 6-transsistor AM radio. Wish I still had it but it succumbed to hobbyist tinkering. One factoid I was not aware of was that Western Electric tried to commercially produce the point contact transistor. You paint a somewhat more generous analysis of William Shockley then I was aware of.

[HennerZeller]

Looking at the physical layout of the triangular shape with the two points at the end, and seeing the sketch at 13:54 ... Just NOW it becomes clear to me why the transistor symbol is the way it is. After I've played with Transistors for the last 40 years. #TIL

[matveyshishov]

This is awesome! I love your channel so much, thank you for your work!
I appreciate details like this deeply, because it makes it clear what details of a technology are meaningful and which are just path-dependent idiosyncrasies.
The search for tube replacement, the name "transistor" itself, the idea for planar technology and ICs, even the choice of packaging for 4004 - all these details matter, it's the difference between remembering a fact and understanding the causality and meaning of ideas.

One more thing that I oftentimes do after your videos is looking up interviews, notes and papers of the people involved, and listen to their direct speech. We're lucky to have many of them captured on film and audio, and many are still alive!

[makerspace]

I went to work at TI in 1973 and remember the guys talking about the good 'ol days when they could sell a transistor for $40. Ah, the older I get, the better I was.

[scottfranco]

Just a quick word. I the early days, what they called a "detector" or radio frequency detector, was just a (relatively) high frequency low current diode. For amplitude modulation, if you perform half wave rectification of an RF signal, you are left with high frequency DC waves with AM modulation. Those high frequency components of the DC signal would be rolled off by the primitive circuits of the day, and thus leave just the DC AM modulation. Thus even a point contact diode could receive AM broadcast on a strong signal, especially if listened to with headphones. Thus they called them "detectors", really just a rectifier in today's language.

[LuciFeric]

Bardeen went on to make important contributions to quantum mechanics.

[denopellegrino]

Wow, flashbacks to my father work back in the day, was one of the first PCB production facilities in the U.S later work on space program and super computers and my favorite was fine line plating equipment and technology that we worked on together.

[douglaswatters]

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.

[fugutabetai]

Great to see some early transistor history! My father grew up in Eastern Washington state and is a professor of Electrical Engineering (in semiconductor lasers). For the past decade or so when we visit his old hometown (Omak, WA) we take a quick trip to Tonasket WA to try to find the original Brattain homestead. My dad was always excited that someone who came out of a tiny town in Eastern Washington, riding on horseback, went on to great success shaping the semiconductor industry and won a Nobel prize. We've tracked out over some pretty wild lands, but haven't found conclusive evidence of the old Brattain homestead yet.