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VI. At Christmas 2013 Turing was posthumously granted a formal pardon by Queen Elizabeth II.
John Bardeen (1908–91), William Shockley (1910–89), and Walter Brattain (1902–87) in a Bell Labs photograph in 1948.
The first transistor at Bell Labs.
William Shockley (at head of table) the day he won the Nobel Prize being toasted by colleagues, including Gordon Moore (seated left) and Robert Noyce (standing center with wine glass) in 1956.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE TRANSISTOR
The invention of computers did not immediately launch a revolution. Because they relied on large, expensive, fragile vacuum tubes that consumed a lot of power, the first computers were costly behemoths that only corporations, research universities, and the military could afford. Instead the true birth of the digital age, the era in which electronic devices became embedded in every aspect of our lives, occurred in Murray Hill, New Jersey, shortly after lunchtime on Tuesday, December 16, 1947. That day two scientists at Bell Labs succeeded in putting together a tiny contraption they had concocted from some strips of gold foil, a chip of semiconducting material, and a bent paper clip. When wiggled just right, it could amplify an electric current and switch it on and off. The transistor, as the device was soon named, became to the digital age what the steam engine was to the Industrial Revolution.
The advent of transistors, and the subsequent i
Three passionate and intense colleagues, whose personalities both complemented and conflicted with one another, would go down in history as the inventors of the transistor: a deft experimentalist named Walter Brattain, a quantum theorist named John Bardeen, and the most passionate and intense of them all—tragically so by the end—a solid-state physics expert named William Shockley.
But there was another player in this drama that was actually as important as any individual: Bell Labs, where these men worked. What made the transistor possible was a mixture of diverse talents rather than just the imaginative leaps of a few geniuses. By its nature, the transistor required a team that threw together theorists who had an intuitive feel for quantum phenomena with material scientists who were adroit at baking impurities into batches of silicon, along with dexterous experimentalists, industrial chemists, manufacturing specialists, and ingenious tinkerers.
BELL LABS
In 1907 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company faced a crisis. The patents of its founder, Alexander Graham Bell, had expired, and it seemed in danger of losing its near-monopoly on phone services. Its board summoned back a retired president, Theodore Vail, who decided to reinvigorate the company by committing to a bold goal: building a system that could co
Thus was the seed planted for a new industrial organization that became known as Bell Labs. Originally located on the western edge of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village overlooking the Hudson River, it brought together theoreticians, materials scientists, metallurgists, engineers, and even AT&T pole climbers. It was where George Stibitz developed a computer using electromagnetic relays and Claude Sha
The head of Bell Labs’ vacuum-tube department was a high-octane Missourian named Mervin Kelly, who had studied to be a metallurgist at the Missouri School of Mines and then got a PhD in physics under Robert Millikan at the University of Chicago. He was able to make vacuum tubes more reliable by devising a water-cooling system, but he realized that tubes would never be an efficient method of amplification or switching. In 1936 he was promoted to research director of Bell Labs, and his first priority was to find an alternative.
Kelly’s great insight was that Bell Labs, which had been a bastion of practical engineering, should also focus on basic science and theoretical research, until then the domain of universities. He began a search for the country’s brightest young physics PhDs. His mission was to make i
“It had become a matter of some consideration at the Labs whether the key to invention was a matter of individual genius or collaboration,” Jon Gertner wrote in The Idea Factory, a study of Bell Labs.2 The answer was both. “It takes many men in many fields of science, pooling their various talents, to fu
The key to i