It is very impressive that he did mention it to his wife. A normal male would just have grunted and gone for the highball or whatever they used to drink in New Jersey.
"This theory takes for granted a force that works instantaneously over infinite distances. Only a madman could ever belive such a thing" -- Sir Issac Newton..... About his own theory of gravity that stood unchallenged for 228 before Einstein published general relativity, which can be reduced to Newtons formular with a "+ G" added at the end. I think that still holds the record for that particular millennium, as far as understating the importance of your own work goes.
@@andersjjensenwhich still takes for granted the existence of some sort of electron-volt field and a lot of other fields, which is basically some sort of infinite ether, but modern physicists don't like when you say that fields are just ether with another name. (mathematically they're)
@@velisvideos6208"Hi, honey, how was your day?" "We discovered something important today". Having a serious clue that anything after would be incomprehensible, "That's nice". A conversation I've actually held with my wife of over 41 years, now sorely missed. Explaining shit to senior executives, that was what I practiced with her. She was no dullard, but not being a specialist in the field, I had an up in preparing technical stuff with her in advance. Humorously, she advanced slightly faster than most executives in technological comprehension.
@@monad_tcpNo. The ether theory specifically stipulates that "the ether" was a physical medium of some sort. Fields and "ethers" are fundamentally different.
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.
Well, that $25k thing was a lot steep for post-war Japan. Seriously, it was. Japan was in ruins still into the 1950's and early '60's. But, they caught up, first with the joke of Made in Japan being of laughable quality to swiftly turning into industrial leaders. Call it bullshit flies in the face of global industry, where Six Sigma is a mantra and originated with Toyota. Introduced by Motorola, Toyota improved it to what it is today. Misapplied, well, the results are equally legendary and at the root of supply chain disruptions during the pandemic.
Japan bought the transistor licence. As a standard part of the deal they were not only given the 800 page book with the theory and specific recipes, but they were also allowed to tour American transistor manufacturing, ask any questions and record everything. Which they did very diligently. The problem, of course, was that in the ruined Japan it was extremely hard to find the equipment and materials, and it took some heroic efforts to produce anything at all.
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
From the historical research I’ve done on bell labs for some presentations for school. It seems it was a really groundbreaking organization both technologically and culturally. I always remember the famous video of Brain Kernighan with his feet on his desk at bell labs holmdel complex. The video is from “ The Unix system: Making Computers More Productive”.
I agree Bell Labs was responsible for a fantastic amount of technological advancement. However they were only interested in making telephone service cheaper and more efficient. So when it came to the battle of the netheads vs the bellheads they lost.
Bell Labs once was ***KNOWN*** to be "The Research Arm Of The Human Race". What judge Green did was a petty destruction of a grand endeavor. Some of us will not forget his act of barbarism. I fear we shall never see its like again.
AT&T was almost a state owned company back then, almost all modern technology was invented with big and stable government money over time, contrary to what people usually say that market competition brings innovation.
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.
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.
> A guy had something that acted like a transistor back in 1925 but didn't pursue the concept. He patented it. Later, a myth was created that his idea didn't work. This myth was extremely convenient for Bell Labs. It later turned out, in the 90's, that it actually did work. Moreover, Bell Labs had actually built working devices based on his patents back in the 40's before "inventing" the transistor. Somehow, this hasn't worked its way into the textbooks yet. The same guy also invented the electrolytic capacitor.
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...
YOU LIE! We have no idea how quantum mechanics works. You are all wizards who wish to ensorcell us and make us your minions... not the cute yellow kind. The icky kind with humps an' wot not. signed: Abby Normal :) Peaceful Skies.
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.
Thank you for making me feel young. I was born in '61. Did the electron tube, transistor, IC, VLSI conversions quite well enough. At least capacitors and resistors didn't change their behavior... ; Odd though, no selenium was mentioned in the documentary.
@@spvillano Funny you mentioned that, yeah selenium rectifiers are a pretty nasty piece of work. In 8-th grade I built a vacuum tube (valve on the other side of the pond) proximity detector from an article in Popular Electronics. Several years ago I ran across a site that had scanned a bunch of old magazines and it had that article. Thought it would be fun to build it again. I've always been fascinated with thyratrons, think SCRs with pilot lights. It used a half wave selenium rectifier to generate the bias voltage, in the rebuild I subtitled a silicon diode. The physic of capacitors and resistors has not changed over the years but now I can hardly see them. As a result I still use through hole for my DIY projects. I picked a good time to be born and reach adulthood, during the early days of the microprocessor. No one knew how to use them so lots of opportunity back in those days.
@@tomschmidt381heh, just yesterday I ran into a video on ancient Cold War telephones used for Civil Defense siren activation and the host mentioned cold cathode thyratrons, albeit not by name. Recognized the technology instantly, we had a class on the damned things back in 1979. A buddy and I had a contest on who could get the thing to glow brighter...
thank u both for making me feel really young! ha ha. Born in 1990, tinkering all my life with electronics. Really, though, my generation and beyond still have tinkerers and those looking up at the sky; rest easy knowing that we still appreciate pioneers great and small for letting us stand on your shoulders to see such a beautiful world. I still use through-hole for some of my more esoteric/artistic projects, Tom, but primarily work with SOIC small package as a standard, and although I never had good eyes to begin with. They are very hard to see without a microscope for me, but we get by that way. the integration of heat table/air for soldering assembly really has been a wonder and boon in that regard, as well.
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.
@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.)
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
As of 2024, we can still purchase point contact diode. Most of the vintage old stock ones have clear glass package. Through the glass, you can see "cat whisker" through a bit of spring tension pushing against a pad of Germanium semiconductor surface. 1N60 diode is the typical one to be found, just have to be careful, majority of the online sellers are using the Silicon schottky diode as the imitation (fake) parts.
Interestingly, these old point contact glass diodes can operate at incredibly high frequencies, even above 1 GHz. With such a diode, the signals emitted by a mobile phone can be easily highlighted.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I still find it awesome when you show the old RCA building ( @ 20:04) in Camden, NJ .... I've seen that building a thousand times and had no idea it was such an iconic piece of history.... but when you showed it for the first time I recognized that blue "Camden Waterfront' sign and realized what it was.... if you look on the left side of the pic, in the background, those building are Center City Philadelphia, and on the far right side of the pic you can see the Ben Franklin Bridge.... A little piece of my small world shown to me through the eyes of technological history from one fo the SMARTEST CHANNELS on TH-cam :)
What is the Clock Tower depicting where the circular clock dial is? Btw, this RCA building is a wonderful vintaged example of early 20th century architecture.
Just a small comment: That building is RCA-VICTOR's HQ building nicknamed The Nipper* Building. It is mainly Victor, the record player/record company (view it as a BU or division.) RCA has a BU called Solid State Division, its HQ is located in Somerville New Jersey. * Nipper is the dog sitting next to the old sonogram with the big horn loudspeaker.
It is also worth mentioning that many more people contributed to the replacement of vacuum tubes. One of them is Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, a Polish-American physicist who proposed the field-effect transistor. See patents: US 1745175 "Method and Apparatus for Controlling Electric Currents" from 1925, US 1900018 "Device for Controlling Electric Currents" filed in 1928, and US 1877140 "Amplifier for Electric Currents" from the same year.
Czochralski (pronounced choh-hral-ski [cho from chocolate, [for the hr just say both close together], al from pal, and ski from ski [i guess]) first worked at my small city of 30k. There isnt even a street about him. Source i am polish (and ipn/wikipedia)
I worked at Bell Labs from '80-'88. A bit past its prime, but still a pretty cool place to work. Murry Hill was kind of like a science Mecca. And a great shout out for Purdue!
Fun fact. There are about 15.000.000.000 transistors in an iphone. With a productiontime of 8400 transistors a month, it will take 148.809 years to have enough for 1 iphone.
The video itself is a banquet of information, simplified for viewers like me I can only imagine the hours of work and resources required to have brought this technology to life 🤯
21:00 Mataré and friends invented/discovered the point-contact transistor separately and almost simultaneously ... They didn't even try to "copy" it, in fact Shockley was shocked that the French Telephone company would use their own design for long distance transmission with better quality than in the US. The story on the Soviet side is more murky and convoluted, due to paranoid secrecy and duplication of works because the labs were strongly compartimented.
German scientists built transistors in 1944 and early 1945. Those first transistors (called not Transistor in Germany but DUO-Diode or Kristalltriode) were made during late WW2 in Germany by three AEG/ Telefunken and Siemens scientists Matthias Falter, Heinrich Welker und Herbert-Francois Mataré for Forschungsanstalt der Deutschen Reichspost at Kloster Leubus later relocated to an underground lab called B3C (Codename "Jonas") near Niedersachswerfen. Those early transistors replaced micro electron tubes in missile guiding system for example inside the V101 Skoda medium range rocket by Dr. Teichmann and Dr. Rolf Engel.
@@Schlipperschlopper I have no online reference about the use of duodiodes, I have only found that they were invented in hope of cancelling noise in the radar rectifiers. "interference" was observed but from the little I had found, no amplifying device was built. Mataré and friends were hired in France to build a diode manufacture and brought the idea with them and could at last make a working device, which was quickly (and shortly) adopted by the French State. But point-contact devices have many shortcomings that later alloyed types would overcome and it was too late for the French. Some people have traced / located early Transistrons in museums and private collections, but never heard of any predating device. Please can you provide more information ?
@@chickenfishhybrid44 I remember finding this mentioned in maybe 2 different recollections, I will see if I can find them 6 months after my SSD crashed. From what I remember : Mataré & colleagues were brought to France by Westinghouse to make diodes, and the duodiode became the Transistron, a few months after the prototype at Bell Labs but before the announcement. When Westinghouse France heard about it (june 30, 1948), they rushed to patent their own version (aug. 13th, 1948), which angered Bell Labs as they could only patent their own (Bardeen-Bratten) design. And the Lilienfeld "omission", so Shockley was already on the edge. Westinghouse trademarked their device as "Westcrel" and worked quickly with PTT (French Postes/Télégraphes/Téléphones) so a batch of 1000 Transistrons was ordered and manufactured. I don't know if those ended up in the telephone relays but they were used in the cable between Algeria and Paris, which was demonstrated to Shockley during his visit to France in 1950. The Westrcrel has higher bandwidth than the GE part, however Shockley was already working on better devices, faster and less fragile. I'll see if I can find details or even the article that mentions Shockley's 1950 visit. I'll have to dig through tens of resources...
seems my reply didn't make it through@@chickenfishhybrid44 .... not the first time though, maybe it was too long ? digging through my notes, transistronised telephone relays appeared in France in 1949 according to an article scan. Also found this quote in a radiomuseum org page (lookup with google because yt comments don't allow urls) " Herbert F. Mataré and Heinrich Welker developed with Westinghouse of Paris a similar mechanism as a transistor and patented this “Transitron” some months later than the Americans, on August 13 1948. They worked before at Siemens on radar technology and did research on “point-contact diode” ED705 as mixer-detector for cm-wave (also ED704, ED707). The Mataré-Welker mechanism led to telephone amplifiers between France and Algeria in 1950. " Bandwidth and gain figures are hard to find. The current might have been 10 to 30mA because the cats whiskers were really tiny. I have found several mentions of better French quality but we all know it was a dead end anyway and politics spoiled everything, Mataré created Intermetal in 1952, not in France... Contact me personally for more references and direct links.
Your content is always first to none because of the news you provide of the semiconductor world. As I work for Applied Materials and your channel helps me stay current to what’s happening. But this content here is Absolutely brilliant. Well done and can’t wait to see what this amazing channel brings! Cheers from Austin Texas!! ❤
Awsome video! Thank you for explaining the advent and development of the transistor with details that other presentations haven't described in this clear and concise way. Also, the amount of research that must have went into producing this video. Kudos!
7:00 So Shockley's actually wanted to build FET transistor, as you correctly described in 6:45 and referred to as silicon version of vacuum tube. This is correct as vacuum tube and FET works on the principle of electric field as modulation force (gate field). Though in 7:00 you started talking about current and bipolar transistors which was a side effect of trials from Shockley's team after several failed attempts on building FET. I actually got a problem by invalid explanation of how transistors work's by some individual in the early days of my education so I immediately spotted that ;) Just thinking it might be important for others as well ;)
Brilliant! Thank you so much. I knew a few bits & details about that story. I didn't know it in anything like that level of detail. That was fascinating. I have heard / read some of the names of those early devices, but nobody ever broke down what they actually were or how they were first made. Once again, excellent work. This is why I subscribed.
Another note: one of the drivers of the first transistorized computers was the realization that flip flops build with transistors could be built that were far more tolerant of variations in transistor manufactured parameters than analog applications such as radios. When attempting to make transistors with stable parameters for consumer applications, the method used was to mass manufacture them, test their parameters, and live with a high rejection rate. As a result, the computer makers were able to come in and buy up lots of "defective" transistors for use in computers that couldn't be used for consumer electronics.
yes, that's part of the Seymour Cray early legends. But as soon as he/CDC could, they ordered custom gold-doped 2N709 silicon NPNs from Fairchild 🙂 (corrected, thanks MrGGPRI)
From the first transistor to the latest and greatest "mixed-dimensional 1D GaAsSb/2D MoS2 heterotransistors" studied by Johnny Ho of City University of Hong Kong .. What a journey .. Could we ask the favor of you finding out from the professor what this new breakthrough transistor is all about and how exactly it is going to change the semiconductor industry ? You make it so easy for average Joe to listen and catch on ..
"Crystal Fire" by Lillian Hoddeson and Michael Riordan is a great book which describes the events at Bell Labs in detail. What a story! Real life is often stranger than fiction.
The invention of the transistor is on of my favorite stories that also happens to be an actual reality. This is a good representation, but the characters involved deserve much more background story IMO. And then the follow up of how Sony engineers were able to reverse engineer and recreate the experiment in the rubble of Tokio with nothing but their own savings and sheer determination.
Compared to the theoretical explanation of how a device is found, the demonstration of the experiments helps me understand the working mechanism more. It also sheds light on how we need to discover new devices, allowing us to see how the history of science progresses gradually.
Great presentation, but you missed the part about Lilienfeld's pre-WW2 transistor patent. He was trying to make field effect transistors with metal oxide devices. Bell Labs eventually learned about Lillienfeld's work. I have seen those first generation point contact transistors that resemble a bronze bolt. A lab in the basement of the building I worked in, at NASA's Ames Research Center had some, along with some other equally old components. They predate NASA and may have been procured by NACA in the early '50s. The engineers who worked in that lab, when I was there, were developing spaceflight hardware that used microcontrollers. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Edgar_Lilienfeld
Thank you for the video. It is always a pleasure to learn about something from you. Your cadence, tone and inflection are most pleasing. Peaceful Skies.
I worked for Northern Telecom Systems Corporation (NTSC) in the '70s. Their parent company was Bell Northern Research Labs that claimed the invention of the transistor.
Great historical once again! Like the old saying goes "The devil is in the details!" I certainly appreciate the thoroughness that made this documentary less patchy than others I have seen.
There are several documentaries such as PBS' "Transistorized!" th-cam.com/video/U4XknGqr3Bo/w-d-xo.html and others, such as a Japanese retrospective. longer, less technical but has some extra context.
Basically an elaboration of crystal radios, but with more theory and purer materials. I guess the galena (lead sulfide) crystal acted like a diode, and by moving the wire whisker one could find a surface area that corresponded to the frequency desired. The tube amplifier performance was the goal, but the idea of solid state was there from the get-go, just a matter of finding the correct solid state materials.(and a heck of a lot of other engineering details). You could probably do an entire episode on the significance of purification, and how important extremely high purity of semiconductor elements has become...... So cool, thank you kindly for another thought provoking video...
I grew up (and now live in) the city where EaglePicher is located. I never knew they were involved in transistors, just knew their battery history. Now I gotta go ask some old guys what they remember...
The first transistor radio was sold by I.D.E.A. and the brand was Regency. The model was the TR-1 The transistors were from Texas Instruments. This was around 1954.
The tr1 cost 10 dollars each at the time and they sold the radios at a loss. I think they became profitable a few months later when production costs came down.
2:16 diagram just shows ac and dc current in a steady state. A rectifier will result in a sort of square wave: up when the ac goes up and then no current when the ac goes negative.
Eventually that alloy junction transistor made it down to the undergrad EE lab level. I remember making one back in the mid 70's. Just like the diagram, a predoped wafer with a couple spots of indium melted in under an argon gas flow. The trick was to heat it long enough to get a thin base layer, but no so long as to short it our,
@@cogoid Daaaamn.... that may have explained why they had so many problems making something work. They were used to vacuum tubes and their surroundings. Soon after the voltages were reduced to 21 or 9V, when the breakdown voltage effect is understood.
Seriously dude your channel has quickly become one of my favorite channels ever and I've been on TH-cam since the earliest of days lol. Great job! Also just wanted to give you my thanks and gratitude for providing me so many hours of top tier entertainment. I know a life of a creator can be a lonely and thankless job but I do very much appreciate all your hard work and thanks again!
Transistors were analogous to carbon-filament bulbs. Bell Labs did not invent the first transistor, or even the practical transistor. Instead, they only had another practical transistor besides the earlier FETs of the 1920s, but they also had Shockley's new semiconductor physics, and that made all the difference. Before their Bipolar Transistor breakthrough, Bell Labs had been trying to patent the FET, but hit a wall, because J.E. Lilienfeld already had working MOSFETs twenty years earlier, all covered by multiple patents. It was Lilienfeld, not Shockley, who applied e-fields to thin conductive films, and observed conductivity-modulation, with, as Bell Lab later said, "useful gain." An eyewitness even reported that Lilienfeld was showing around a 4-transistor radio to various manufacturers in the 1930s. The Bell Labs project even included an attempt to duplicate Lilienfeld's transistors, and they succeeded at this, but kept very quiet about it. (When they published the first BJT paper, they simultaneously published the results of testing the Lilienfeld FET, but without revealing this, in that "current modulation" paper. Also, Bell Labs people constantly stated that Lilienfeld was a theorist who never built the FETs in his patents. (They knew this how?) No, Lilienfeld was an experimentalist, with no semiconductor theory, had built an entire transistor radio receiver, even patenting it, and besides, Bell had replicated successful Lilienfeld FETs, even though they concealed this fact when publishing the results! ) Because of decades-old prior art, they couldn't patent anything involving FETs, and besides, old FET patents were now in public-domain, impossible for anyone to own the invention. They were stuck. Transistors couldn't be a money-making product. Fortunately for them, their invention of the BJT broke this jam. But we'd never know all of this dirty back-story, if we listen only to Bell Labs, just as we'd never hear about all the earlier incandescent light bulbs if we only listen to GE and Thomas Edison. (Heh, DO NOT LOOK AT THE LILIENFELD MOSFET BEHIND THE CURTAIN! IT WILL ONLY CONFUSE YOU!) History really really really is written by the winners (didn't we already know this? Or do we only give it lip-service, while disbelieving?) We're only taught a dishonest version of tech-breakthroughs, particularly when it involves large corporations (Note well that Bell Labs is a business, and so expected to tell lies constantly, if it involves invention priority and corporate propaganda.) Westinghouse, the winner of the AC/DC battle, lit the entire Chicago worlds fair with tens of thousands of non-Edison light bulbs, after underbidding Edison on the contract. The earlier Sawyer-Mann carbon-filament bulb had been a failure: short operating lifetime, and a glued stopper to allow filaments to be replaced. But they worked well enough for use at the world's fair, with many hundreds of workers swapping out the constant stream of dead bulbs. .
I keep begging you to do the industry of Japanese hi-fi entertainment. You even started with the first transistor radio from Sony, where it all began. Do the rest until it ends in the early 00s. Unless you want me to pay you to do it. I can do that too~
I remember explaining to my grandma how a transistor works, and she lamented that she didn't take physics. I then realized that at the time she was in high school or even college, the curriculum taught would have never been updated with transistors or semi conductors in mind.
If not for being near his family, why did Shockley go to California ? there was his university, IIRC. But what other reason do you think motivated him ?
Shockley was connected to Caltech, and Stanford administration also encouraged him to settle in the area. Beckman's company was in LA. Shockley's mother was also in California.
The length of your video, almost 25 minutes, is perfect. The length of an average episode of an average anime du saison. However, it takes me far more than 25 minutes to watch your video. Most of the time is spent on the other screens, where I'm reading up on Wikipedia on the things and people mentioned in your videos. And from there, I venture out deeper into the subjects on Wikipedia. I assume you're familiar with how that works. Your episodes are entrees, amuse-bouches really, to a full course meal of knowledge.
Will you also do a video on the history of the printed circuits? Over here we were taught that it was the next big step or "generation" of semiconductor devices.
Amazing how after someone proves it is possible, many others, independently, can make one by their selves. Just like after Alberto Santos Dumont flew for the first time an airplane in the world. After that, aviation finally started to develop.
Im not sure how i feel about the us miletery turning down classifying the transistor like they were a group of collage kids whose just found out how to brew beer at home. Not often they say "its too important to keep to ourselves."
yet it happened... This greatly confused the Soviets because the Soviets believed the US would try to mislead them toward a technological dead end. Meanwhile the Western bloc ramped up production and technology like crazy and left the Soviets lagging a decade behind. (summarized from a Russian page I found last year while researching the subject from different angles)
10:27 "We discovered something important today" easily qualifies as understatement of the century, possibly the millenium
It is very impressive that he did mention it to his wife. A normal male would just have grunted and gone for the highball or whatever they used to drink in New Jersey.
"This theory takes for granted a force that works instantaneously over infinite distances. Only a madman could ever belive such a thing" -- Sir Issac Newton..... About his own theory of gravity that stood unchallenged for 228 before Einstein published general relativity, which can be reduced to Newtons formular with a "+ G" added at the end.
I think that still holds the record for that particular millennium, as far as understating the importance of your own work goes.
@@andersjjensenwhich still takes for granted the existence of some sort of electron-volt field and a lot of other fields, which is basically some sort of infinite ether, but modern physicists don't like when you say that fields are just ether with another name. (mathematically they're)
@@velisvideos6208"Hi, honey, how was your day?"
"We discovered something important today".
Having a serious clue that anything after would be incomprehensible, "That's nice".
A conversation I've actually held with my wife of over 41 years, now sorely missed.
Explaining shit to senior executives, that was what I practiced with her. She was no dullard, but not being a specialist in the field, I had an up in preparing technical stuff with her in advance.
Humorously, she advanced slightly faster than most executives in technological comprehension.
@@monad_tcpNo. The ether theory specifically stipulates that "the ether" was a physical medium of some sort. Fields and "ethers" are fundamentally different.
I LOVE THE ASAINOMETRY TH-cam CHANNEL!!!
ME TOO SIMPLY THE BEST!!!!!!
We all do. Damned solid stuff every week.
We all do...
It was not long ago that he only had like 20k subs. And one day I looked and he had 600k. Quality content.
Its among the best
The amount of transistors this videosignal has gone trough from inception to my viewing is astronomical.
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.
Well, that $25k thing was a lot steep for post-war Japan.
Seriously, it was. Japan was in ruins still into the 1950's and early '60's. But, they caught up, first with the joke of Made in Japan being of laughable quality to swiftly turning into industrial leaders.
Call it bullshit flies in the face of global industry, where Six Sigma is a mantra and originated with Toyota.
Introduced by Motorola, Toyota improved it to what it is today.
Misapplied, well, the results are equally legendary and at the root of supply chain disruptions during the pandemic.
are you referring to th-cam.com/video/XLlIb_p11cM/w-d-xo.html ?
Part 2 : th-cam.com/video/fRCqhSONNiE/w-d-xo.html
and th-cam.com/video/bwhU9goCiaI/w-d-xo.html of course !
Japan bought the transistor licence. As a standard part of the deal they were not only given the 800 page book with the theory and specific recipes, but they were also allowed to tour American transistor manufacturing, ask any questions and record everything. Which they did very diligently. The problem, of course, was that in the ruined Japan it was extremely hard to find the equipment and materials, and it took some heroic efforts to produce anything at all.
Also thanks to Japan we have the lighting amd entertainment led's bc of creating a blue light emitting diode
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
From the historical research I’ve done on bell labs for some presentations for school. It seems it was a really groundbreaking organization both technologically and culturally. I always remember the famous video of Brain Kernighan with his feet on his desk at bell labs holmdel complex. The video is from “ The Unix system: Making Computers More Productive”.
I agree Bell Labs was responsible for a fantastic amount of technological advancement. However they were only interested in making telephone service cheaper and more efficient. So when it came to the battle of the netheads vs the bellheads they lost.
Bell Labs once was ***KNOWN*** to be "The Research Arm Of The Human Race".
What judge Green did was a petty destruction of a grand endeavor.
Some of us will not forget his act of barbarism. I fear we shall never see its like again.
@@phlogistanjones2722 : Was that the fellow that decided to break up AT&T?
AT&T was almost a state owned company back then, almost all modern technology was invented with big and stable government money over time, contrary to what people usually say that market competition brings innovation.
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.
take pictures of it !!!
Google search
Vintage GEC(UK) GET1 GET2 transistor
should get you there
Wow, what a treasure 😮
I guess they weren't careful enough.
@@Doctorlockpick we learn better from our mistakes 😀
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.
> A guy had something that acted like a transistor back in 1925 but didn't pursue the concept.
He patented it. Later, a myth was created that his idea didn't work. This myth was extremely convenient for Bell Labs. It later turned out, in the 90's, that it actually did work. Moreover, Bell Labs had actually built working devices based on his patents back in the 40's before "inventing" the transistor. Somehow, this hasn't worked its way into the textbooks yet.
The same guy also invented the electrolytic capacitor.
@@peterfireflylundcould you please tell his name?
@@bearcb Julius Lilienfeld.
@@peterfireflylund thanks!
@@peterfireflylund Do you have a source on Bell Labs building devices based on Lilienfeld's design, in the 40s?
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...
and then Intel, AMD, you name it...
U no so much much but u cant rite proper like
eccentricities...LOL...the guy was an Fn kook!....
@@Idler_JP lmao dis cat seething cuz sum words
Truelly sadge
@@Idler_JP MADGE LOL
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.
Even as a studying Mechanical Engineer, I still feel the same. Asianometry’s technical history videos are a gem.
I’m an EE and would have loved to have TH-cam and these resources (including ChatGPT)
@@stachowiI’m in school for CE and if it’s not for Jon and Asianometry I probably would have lost motivation 2 semesters ago.
I just went PP and i still like these videos.
@@tictacdude3468 Truly are. Epic.
Bardeen went on to make important contributions to quantum mechanics.
YOU LIE! We have no idea how quantum mechanics works.
You are all wizards who wish to ensorcell us and make us your minions... not the cute yellow kind. The icky kind with humps an' wot not.
signed: Abby Normal
:)
Peaceful Skies.
and he got two Nobel prizes as well
Bardeen is the "B" of BCS-theory, the theory of how superconductors work.
"This is not a scientific diagram. Please don't come at me"
Subscribed.
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.
Thank you for making me feel young. I was born in '61.
Did the electron tube, transistor, IC, VLSI conversions quite well enough. At least capacitors and resistors didn't change their behavior... ;
Odd though, no selenium was mentioned in the documentary.
@@spvillano Funny you mentioned that, yeah selenium rectifiers are a pretty nasty piece of work. In 8-th grade I built a vacuum tube (valve on the other side of the pond) proximity detector from an article in Popular Electronics. Several years ago I ran across a site that had scanned a bunch of old magazines and it had that article. Thought it would be fun to build it again. I've always been fascinated with thyratrons, think SCRs with pilot lights. It used a half wave selenium rectifier to generate the bias voltage, in the rebuild I subtitled a silicon diode.
The physic of capacitors and resistors has not changed over the years but now I can hardly see them. As a result I still use through hole for my DIY projects.
I picked a good time to be born and reach adulthood, during the early days of the microprocessor. No one knew how to use them so lots of opportunity back in those days.
@@tomschmidt381heh, just yesterday I ran into a video on ancient Cold War telephones used for Civil Defense siren activation and the host mentioned cold cathode thyratrons, albeit not by name. Recognized the technology instantly, we had a class on the damned things back in 1979.
A buddy and I had a contest on who could get the thing to glow brighter...
thank u both for making me feel really young! ha ha. Born in 1990, tinkering all my life with electronics. Really, though, my generation and beyond still have tinkerers and those looking up at the sky; rest easy knowing that we still appreciate pioneers great and small for letting us stand on your shoulders to see such a beautiful world. I still use through-hole for some of my more esoteric/artistic projects, Tom, but primarily work with SOIC small package as a standard, and although I never had good eyes to begin with. They are very hard to see without a microscope for me, but we get by that way. the integration of heat table/air for soldering assembly really has been a wonder and boon in that regard, as well.
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.
they are still 40 bucks... on eBay :-D fuzz pedal makers crave them.
Some of the old sprague bumblebees and such can fetch $500+ EACH!!
@@realryder2626 but what for ? They are fragile as hell...
@@yxyk-fr switching pickups on old fender electric guitars and such
@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.)
that's right :-) IBM used the junction transistor symbol, for a while in the early 60s, and dropped it later...
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
As of 2024, we can still purchase point contact diode. Most of the vintage old stock ones have clear glass package. Through the glass, you can see "cat whisker" through a bit of spring tension pushing against a pad of Germanium semiconductor surface. 1N60 diode is the typical one to be found, just have to be careful, majority of the online sellers are using the Silicon schottky diode as the imitation (fake) parts.
1N34 is common too 🙂
Interestingly, these old point contact glass diodes can operate at incredibly high frequencies, even above 1 GHz. With such a diode, the signals emitted by a mobile phone can be easily highlighted.
@@marianl8718 Just a few hours ago I saw on FB a circuit that uses a LED as rectifier for AM reception 😀
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.
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.
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.
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!
I still find it awesome when you show the old RCA building ( @ 20:04) in Camden, NJ .... I've seen that building a thousand times and had no idea it was such an iconic piece of history.... but when you showed it for the first time I recognized that blue "Camden Waterfront' sign and realized what it was.... if you look on the left side of the pic, in the background, those building are Center City Philadelphia, and on the far right side of the pic you can see the Ben Franklin Bridge....
A little piece of my small world shown to me through the eyes of technological history from one fo the SMARTEST CHANNELS on TH-cam :)
What is the Clock Tower depicting where the circular clock dial is?
Btw, this RCA building is a wonderful vintaged example of early 20th century architecture.
Just a small comment:
That building is RCA-VICTOR's HQ building nicknamed The Nipper* Building. It is mainly Victor, the record player/record company (view it as a BU or division.)
RCA has a BU called Solid State Division, its HQ is located in Somerville New Jersey.
* Nipper is the dog sitting next to the old sonogram with the big horn loudspeaker.
It is also worth mentioning that many more people contributed to the replacement of vacuum tubes. One of them is Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, a Polish-American physicist who proposed the field-effect transistor. See patents: US 1745175 "Method and Apparatus for Controlling Electric Currents" from 1925, US 1900018 "Device for Controlling Electric Currents" filed in 1928, and US 1877140 "Amplifier for Electric Currents" from the same year.
it was mentioned quickly... but a detailed documentary would run for 4 hours at least !
Czochralski (pronounced choh-hral-ski [cho from chocolate, [for the hr just say both close together], al from pal, and ski from ski [i guess]) first worked at my small city of 30k. There isnt even a street about him.
Source i am polish (and ipn/wikipedia)
Forget about that I cringed at how he pronounced Sylvania.
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.
I worked at Bell Labs from '80-'88. A bit past its prime, but still a pretty cool place to work. Murry Hill was kind of like a science Mecca. And a great shout out for Purdue!
Wow! Also the mentioned article on "how the 1st transistor worked" is very much worth the read.
Fun fact.
There are about 15.000.000.000 transistors in an iphone.
With a productiontime of 8400 transistors a month, it will take 148.809 years to have enough for 1 iphone.
About 60 trillion transistors were created while I read your comment:)
That is just in the CPU itself. If you also count memory transistors, the number is easily 100 times greater.
This guy just spits quality after quality material. I did know this story but you gave it a new dimension. I mean, it is just really good to follow.
Man this is maybe one of your best vids, really enjoyed it.
And here we see the Book of Genesis, efficiently condensed into 25 minutes and presented with great confidence. Very well done, excellent video.
The video itself is a banquet of information, simplified for viewers like me
I can only imagine the hours of work and resources required to have brought this technology to life 🤯
it's an endless rabbit hole so the real merit is going back to real life and report about the trip 😀
21:00 Mataré and friends invented/discovered the point-contact transistor separately and almost simultaneously ... They didn't even try to "copy" it, in fact Shockley was shocked that the French Telephone company would use their own design for long distance transmission with better quality than in the US.
The story on the Soviet side is more murky and convoluted, due to paranoid secrecy and duplication of works because the labs were strongly compartimented.
German scientists built transistors in 1944 and early 1945. Those first transistors (called not Transistor in Germany but DUO-Diode or Kristalltriode) were made during late WW2 in Germany by three AEG/ Telefunken and Siemens scientists Matthias Falter, Heinrich Welker und Herbert-Francois Mataré for Forschungsanstalt der Deutschen Reichspost at Kloster Leubus later relocated to an underground lab called B3C (Codename "Jonas") near Niedersachswerfen. Those early transistors replaced micro electron tubes in missile guiding system for example inside the V101 Skoda medium range rocket by Dr. Teichmann and Dr. Rolf Engel.
@@Schlipperschlopper I have no online reference about the use of duodiodes, I have only found that they were invented in hope of cancelling noise in the radar rectifiers. "interference" was observed but from the little I had found, no amplifying device was built. Mataré and friends were hired in France to build a diode manufacture and brought the idea with them and could at last make a working device, which was quickly (and shortly) adopted by the French State. But point-contact devices have many shortcomings that later alloyed types would overcome and it was too late for the French.
Some people have traced / located early Transistrons in museums and private collections, but never heard of any predating device.
Please can you provide more information ?
Reference for Shockley being "shocked" and the better quality? Where did you find this?
@@chickenfishhybrid44
I remember finding this mentioned in maybe 2 different recollections, I will see if I can find them 6 months after my SSD crashed.
From what I remember :
Mataré & colleagues were brought to France by Westinghouse to make diodes, and the duodiode became the Transistron, a few months after the prototype at Bell Labs but before the announcement. When Westinghouse France heard about it (june 30, 1948), they rushed to patent their own version (aug. 13th, 1948), which angered Bell Labs as they could only patent their own (Bardeen-Bratten) design. And the Lilienfeld "omission", so Shockley was already on the edge.
Westinghouse trademarked their device as "Westcrel" and worked quickly with PTT (French Postes/Télégraphes/Téléphones) so a batch of 1000 Transistrons was ordered and manufactured. I don't know if those ended up in the telephone relays but they were used in the cable between Algeria and Paris, which was demonstrated to Shockley during his visit to France in 1950. The Westrcrel has higher bandwidth than the GE part, however Shockley was already working on better devices, faster and less fragile.
I'll see if I can find details or even the article that mentions Shockley's 1950 visit. I'll have to dig through tens of resources...
seems my reply didn't make it through@@chickenfishhybrid44 .... not the first time though, maybe it was too long ?
digging through my notes,
transistronised telephone relays appeared in France in 1949 according to an article scan.
Also found this quote in a radiomuseum org page (lookup with google because yt comments don't allow urls)
" Herbert F. Mataré and Heinrich Welker developed with Westinghouse of Paris a similar mechanism as a transistor and patented this “Transitron” some months later than the Americans, on August 13 1948. They worked before at Siemens on radar technology and did research on “point-contact diode” ED705 as mixer-detector for cm-wave (also ED704, ED707). The Mataré-Welker mechanism led to telephone amplifiers between France and Algeria in 1950. "
Bandwidth and gain figures are hard to find. The current might have been 10 to 30mA because the cats whiskers were really tiny. I have found several mentions of better French quality but we all know it was a dead end anyway and politics spoiled everything, Mataré created Intermetal in 1952, not in France...
Contact me personally for more references and direct links.
4:52 The Eagle-Picher company also made the batteries for the Apollo moon missions.
To this day radios in my country are colloquially referred to as transistors.
In my country China, many old people also called the radio as “半导体”(semiconductor).
I love this three inch process node transistor.
Your content is always first to none because of the news you provide of the semiconductor world. As I work for Applied Materials and your channel helps me stay current to what’s happening. But this content here is Absolutely brilliant. Well done and can’t wait to see what this amazing channel brings! Cheers from Austin Texas!! ❤
Awsome video! Thank you for explaining the advent and development of the transistor with details that other presentations haven't described in this clear and concise way. Also, the amount of research that must have went into producing this video. Kudos!
0:04 Amazing what Buster Bluth was up to in the 1940s.
Joking aside, love your videos, keep up the great work
7:00 So Shockley's actually wanted to build FET transistor, as you correctly described in 6:45 and referred to as silicon version of vacuum tube. This is correct as vacuum tube and FET works on the principle of electric field as modulation force (gate field). Though in 7:00 you started talking about current and bipolar transistors which was a side effect of trials from Shockley's team after several failed attempts on building FET.
I actually got a problem by invalid explanation of how transistors work's by some individual in the early days of my education so I immediately spotted that ;)
Just thinking it might be important for others as well ;)
Brilliant! Thank you so much. I knew a few bits & details about that story. I didn't know it in anything like that level of detail. That was fascinating. I have heard / read some of the names of those early devices, but nobody ever broke down what they actually were or how they were first made.
Once again, excellent work. This is why I subscribed.
Another note: one of the drivers of the first transistorized computers was the realization that flip flops build with transistors could be built that were far more tolerant of variations in transistor manufactured parameters than analog applications such as radios. When attempting to make transistors with stable parameters for consumer applications, the method used was to mass manufacture them, test their parameters, and live with a high rejection rate. As a result, the computer makers were able to come in and buy up lots of "defective" transistors for use in computers that couldn't be used for consumer electronics.
yes, that's part of the Seymour Cray early legends.
But as soon as he/CDC could, they ordered custom gold-doped 2N709 silicon NPNs from Fairchild 🙂 (corrected, thanks MrGGPRI)
I believe you mean 2N709 which is common silicon switcher...
yup @@MrGGPRI that was a typo 🙂sorry
Hey! I sat next to Glen Zorpette as a summer intern at IEEE Spectrum between my junior and senior year as an EE student. Excellent tech journalist.
From the first transistor to the latest and greatest "mixed-dimensional 1D GaAsSb/2D MoS2 heterotransistors" studied by Johnny Ho of City University of Hong Kong .. What a journey .. Could we ask the favor of you finding out from the professor what this new breakthrough transistor is all about and how exactly it is going to change the semiconductor industry ? You make it so easy for average Joe to listen and catch on ..
Great idea for next video!
"Crystal Fire" by Lillian Hoddeson and Michael Riordan is a great book which describes the events at Bell Labs in detail. What a story! Real life is often stranger than fiction.
I'd read it.
This is one of many types of videos i needed to find, thank you for making this! Saved.
The invention of the transistor is on of my favorite stories that also happens to be an actual reality. This is a good representation, but the characters involved deserve much more background story IMO. And then the follow up of how Sony engineers were able to reverse engineer and recreate the experiment in the rubble of Tokio with nothing but their own savings and sheer determination.
Agreed, would really like to hear the Sony story
Compared to the theoretical explanation of how a device is found, the demonstration of the experiments helps me understand the working mechanism more. It also sheds light on how we need to discover new devices, allowing us to see how the history of science progresses gradually.
Great presentation, but you missed the part about Lilienfeld's pre-WW2 transistor patent. He was trying to make field effect transistors with metal oxide devices. Bell Labs eventually learned about Lillienfeld's work. I have seen those first generation point contact transistors that resemble a bronze bolt. A lab in the basement of the building I worked in, at NASA's Ames Research Center had some, along with some other equally old components. They predate NASA and may have been procured by NACA in the early '50s. The engineers who worked in that lab, when I was there, were developing spaceflight hardware that used microcontrollers.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Edgar_Lilienfeld
Thank you for the video.
It is always a pleasure to learn about something from you.
Your cadence, tone and inflection are most pleasing.
Peaceful Skies.
I think I got my first CK722s in 1960. I remember being very thrilled. I was 16.
I got my first CK722s in 1961. I was 12. What a life.
Hey Jon, love your insanely detailed videos on semi-conductor companies. Would love to see one on Texas Instruments.
You have this format down to a science. Keep up the awesome work 🎉
I did not see that Malcolm Gladwell throwdown coming... Great video. 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
How can your comment be 2 month old? the vid is only online for minutes
@@tami6867 glitch in the matrix. This dude is a time traveler.
@@tami6867 Patreon channel supporters are granted early access.
This is gonna be a good one. Love the history and technicality as I learn electrical engineering and industrial control. Keep it up Asianometry
I dropped outta college and I LOVE THE ASIANOMETRY TH-cam CHANNEL!!!!
Dude, you keep putting out great content, regularly!!!
I worked for Northern Telecom Systems Corporation (NTSC) in the '70s. Their parent company was Bell Northern Research Labs that claimed the invention of the transistor.
An Amazing video, the quality of information and explanation is truly mind blowing. Can't wait for more.
Very well done, I thoroughly enjoyed watching this. Thank you for this.
Excited for this vid
Great historical once again! Like the old saying goes "The devil is in the details!" I certainly appreciate the thoroughness that made this documentary less patchy than others I have seen.
There are several documentaries such as PBS' "Transistorized!" th-cam.com/video/U4XknGqr3Bo/w-d-xo.html and others, such as a Japanese retrospective. longer, less technical but has some extra context.
Basically an elaboration of crystal radios, but with more theory and purer materials.
I guess the galena (lead sulfide) crystal acted like a diode, and by moving the wire whisker one could find a surface area that corresponded to the frequency desired.
The tube amplifier performance was the goal, but the idea of solid state was there from the get-go, just a matter of finding the correct solid state materials.(and a heck of a lot of other engineering details).
You could probably do an entire episode on the significance of purification, and how important extremely high purity of semiconductor elements has become......
So cool, thank you kindly for another thought provoking video...
I grew up (and now live in) the city where EaglePicher is located. I never knew they were involved in transistors, just knew their battery history. Now I gotta go ask some old guys what they remember...
The first transistor radio was sold by I.D.E.A. and the brand was Regency. The model was the TR-1 The transistors were from Texas Instruments. This was around 1954.
and prototypes were demonstrated a year earlier at trade shows.
The tr1 cost 10 dollars each at the time and they sold the radios at a loss. I think they became profitable a few months later when production costs came down.
2:16 diagram just shows ac and dc current in a steady state. A rectifier will result in a sort of square wave: up when the ac goes up and then no current when the ac goes negative.
Eventually that alloy junction transistor made it down to the undergrad EE lab level. I remember making one back in the mid 70's. Just like the diagram, a predoped wafer with a couple spots of indium melted in under an argon gas flow. The trick was to heat it long enough to get a thin base layer, but no so long as to short it our,
Now THAT's an interesting comment ! This fabrication method has long been forgotten...
I understand this Bardeen fellow is quite clever.
Ida liked to know the voltages they were experimenting with back then. Im guessing 5 volts?
The December 24, 1947 drawing from the notebook (13:53) shows the collector battery of 90V, and the emitter battery 2-3 volts.
@@cogoid Daaaamn.... that may have explained why they had so many problems making something work. They were used to vacuum tubes and their surroundings.
Soon after the voltages were reduced to 21 or 9V, when the breakdown voltage effect is understood.
simply glad that you're making videos, carry on
A good book about this and other developments at Bell Labs is "The Idea Factory"
Seriously dude your channel has quickly become one of my favorite channels ever and I've been on TH-cam since the earliest of days lol. Great job!
Also just wanted to give you my thanks and gratitude for providing me so many hours of top tier entertainment. I know a life of a creator can be a lonely and thankless job but I do very much appreciate all your hard work and thanks again!
Transistors were analogous to carbon-filament bulbs. Bell Labs did not invent the first transistor, or even the practical transistor. Instead, they only had another practical transistor besides the earlier FETs of the 1920s, but they also had Shockley's new semiconductor physics, and that made all the difference.
Before their Bipolar Transistor breakthrough, Bell Labs had been trying to patent the FET, but hit a wall, because J.E. Lilienfeld already had working MOSFETs twenty years earlier, all covered by multiple patents. It was Lilienfeld, not Shockley, who applied e-fields to thin conductive films, and observed conductivity-modulation, with, as Bell Lab later said, "useful gain." An eyewitness even reported that Lilienfeld was showing around a 4-transistor radio to various manufacturers in the 1930s. The Bell Labs project even included an attempt to duplicate Lilienfeld's transistors, and they succeeded at this, but kept very quiet about it. (When they published the first BJT paper, they simultaneously published the results of testing the Lilienfeld FET, but without revealing this, in that "current modulation" paper. Also, Bell Labs people constantly stated that Lilienfeld was a theorist who never built the FETs in his patents. (They knew this how?) No, Lilienfeld was an experimentalist, with no semiconductor theory, had built an entire transistor radio receiver, even patenting it, and besides, Bell had replicated successful Lilienfeld FETs, even though they concealed this fact when publishing the results! )
Because of decades-old prior art, they couldn't patent anything involving FETs, and besides, old FET patents were now in public-domain, impossible for anyone to own the invention. They were stuck. Transistors couldn't be a money-making product. Fortunately for them, their invention of the BJT broke this jam. But we'd never know all of this dirty back-story, if we listen only to Bell Labs, just as we'd never hear about all the earlier incandescent light bulbs if we only listen to GE and Thomas Edison. (Heh, DO NOT LOOK AT THE LILIENFELD MOSFET BEHIND THE CURTAIN! IT WILL ONLY CONFUSE YOU!)
History really really really is written by the winners (didn't we already know this? Or do we only give it lip-service, while disbelieving?) We're only taught a dishonest version of tech-breakthroughs, particularly when it involves large corporations (Note well that Bell Labs is a business, and so expected to tell lies constantly, if it involves invention priority and corporate propaganda.)
Westinghouse, the winner of the AC/DC battle, lit the entire Chicago worlds fair with tens of thousands of non-Edison light bulbs, after underbidding Edison on the contract. The earlier Sawyer-Mann carbon-filament bulb had been a failure: short operating lifetime, and a glued stopper to allow filaments to be replaced. But they worked well enough for use at the world's fair, with many hundreds of workers swapping out the constant stream of dead bulbs.
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This is quality learning ! I love this channel ❤
I keep begging you to do the industry of Japanese hi-fi entertainment. You even started with the first transistor radio from Sony, where it all began. Do the rest until it ends in the early 00s. Unless you want me to pay you to do it. I can do that too~
I remember explaining to my grandma how a transistor works, and she lamented that she didn't take physics. I then realized that at the time she was in high school or even college, the curriculum taught would have never been updated with transistors or semi conductors in mind.
thanks to john's channel, i have approximate knowledge of so many things
If not for being near his family, why did Shockley go to California ?
there was his university, IIRC. But what other reason do you think motivated him ?
Shockley went to California to work for Beckman.
Shockley was connected to Caltech, and Stanford administration also encouraged him to settle in the area. Beckman's company was in LA. Shockley's mother was also in California.
@@cogoid so yes, as i understood earlier, this "choice" was a combination of factors. Thanks for confirming 🙂
0:05 actually the zero hour is 12am Jan 1 1970
The length of your video, almost 25 minutes, is perfect. The length of an average episode of an average anime du saison. However, it takes me far more than 25 minutes to watch your video. Most of the time is spent on the other screens, where I'm reading up on Wikipedia on the things and people mentioned in your videos. And from there, I venture out deeper into the subjects on Wikipedia. I assume you're familiar with how that works. Your episodes are entrees, amuse-bouches really, to a full course meal of knowledge.
I wish I had a dvd box of all the episodes i watched of yourse
Thank you, Jon! Another great video.
great work as always
Appreciating the deep dive into the transistor's legacy. It sparks curiosity about how future materials will further revolutionize technology
Do you imagine our actual world _WITHOUT_ the transistor..?
Greetings from Argentina❤
Great video. This is going to do numbers for sure
This is brilliant! Thank you.
I some how expected Paul Harvey at the end... "And now you know _the rest_ of the story." 😁
That was fascinating, thank you.
Thank for producing this educational video!
Wonderful presentation!
Will you also do a video on the history of the printed circuits? Over here we were taught that it was the next big step or "generation" of semiconductor devices.
The Idea Factory book details these developments. Excellent work Asianometry
You’re killing it
Asianometry is one of THEE channels on YT
Amazing how after someone proves it is possible, many others, independently, can make one by their selves.
Just like after Alberto Santos Dumont flew for the first time an airplane in the world.
After that, aviation finally started to develop.
Here I was thinking that zero hour for all electronics was 00:00:00 01-01-1970 UTC. 🤔
ah, the UNIX epoch is something different 😛 it's zero hour for /computers/
Damnit ! I did a thorough research on this historical subject several months ago 😀
Im not sure how i feel about the us miletery turning down classifying the transistor like they were a group of collage kids whose just found out how to brew beer at home. Not often they say "its too important to keep to ourselves."
yet it happened...
This greatly confused the Soviets because the Soviets believed the US would try to mislead them toward a technological dead end.
Meanwhile the Western bloc ramped up production and technology like crazy and left the Soviets lagging a decade behind.
(summarized from a Russian page I found last year while researching the subject from different angles)
Had to look that up, tho it's obvious from context - Esaki diode == tunnel diode, interesting device with negative resistance.
"No salmon were harmed in the making of this film."
I've been a full time tube amplifier tech for several years now and there are not many people that do this anymore.