First Transistor

Today's picture shows the first transistor which was developed by William Shockley in the 1950's. While this device is crude in appearance, it demonstrated the physics which enabled the modern electronics revolution.

Prior to the transistor, all electronics were made of vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes were fragile, relatively large, expensive, and burned out all the time. The more complicated an electronic device was, the more vacuum tubes it required, and hence the more often it stopped working, because one of the tubes would burn out. The transistor was a small, solid state device, built in a semiconducting material. Transistors could be built very affordably and pretty much would last forever. Initially they were used to simply replace vacuum tubes. Designs that had 20 tubes would be built instead with 20 individual transistors. The big breakthrough came a few years later when people realized that instead of building individual transistors on a piece of Silicon, and then assembling them that all the transistors could be built at the same time on a piece of silicon, batch fabricating the entire circuit. This is what became known as the modern Integrated Circuit. Today, Silicon chips the size of a postage stamp can have over 10 Billion transistors.

UPDATE:

The thumbs up and thumbs down buttons have been causing problems with the operation of the WEB site, so I have taken them off, and replaced them with the google "+1" button. If you like the post, give it a plus one. Out to the side it should show how many people have given it a plus one. Google actually keeps track of the numbers and uses them to steer people to sites that people like.