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The Bipolar Junction Transistor (BJT) was invented by three scientists, William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, in 1948. They all worked at Bell Labs, and were trying to find something to replace the bulky and heat wasting vacuum tubes. They had been pursuing a Field Effect Transistor (FET) based on copper oxide when they stumbled upon a very different amplifying effect produced by closely-spaced metal contacts touching Germanium semiconductor. They won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in 1956.

When the Bell Labs scientists continued to investigate a possible FET transistor, they discovered that one of these had already been patented by Physicist J. Edgar Lilienfeld. Lilienfeld's insulated-gate FET (or MOSFET) was based on thin film semiconductor deposited on glass, and was invented over 25 years before the BJT, in the early 1920s.

Transistor History

http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/physics/transistor/history/

The Transistor Museum

http://semiconductormuseum.com/Museum_Index.htm

Lilienfeld transistor history

http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/history/lilienfeld.htm

William Shockley, Walter Brattain, John Bardeen

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12y ago

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