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The Transistor's 60th Birthday
Apple Acolyte sends in a Forbes piece noting the 60th birthday of the transistor on Dec, 16. For the occasion the AP provides the obligatory Moore's-Law-is-ending, no-it-isn't article. From Forbes: "Sixty years ago, on Dec. 16, 1947, three physicists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., built the world's first transistor. William Shockley, John Bardeen and William Brattain had been looking for a semiconductor amplifier to take the place of the vacuum tubes that made radios and other electronics so impossibly bulky, hot and power hungry."
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Either no one cares about the poor transistor, or you've all gotten lives.
a nice, warm-sounding amplifier is not something made of transistors. It's a series of tubes.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
it's all about the nano sized tubes
the AP provides the obligatory Moore's-Law-is-ending, no-it-isn't article.
Not really-- if you're AMD, Moore's Law and Murphy's Law are kind of becoming the same thing.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Ah, i wish i was around when the transistor was invented. I, like my father, and my fathers father, am an electronics geek. My grandpa used to be a teacher in the field of electronics, and he told me that the invention of the transistor led to all electronics-teacher were called in for a course on the transistor. I doubt that any device to come can change or suplement so much in a field anymore as the transistor did to electronics.
Pure awesomenes
The field effect transistor, the device that is relevant today, was invented and patented in 1926 by
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld. Due to his patents many claims by Bell Labs were thrown out.
The device that was invented by Bell Labs in 1947 was a point contact transistor. An inherently fragile device not fit for mass production. The same device was invented in parallel in France by two german Scientists: Welker and Matere see here.
Schockley himself did however invent the bipolar junction transistor a couple of years later. This invention was truly a streak of genius as it is the most complex of all devices.
So, thanks to american corporate giants history was rewritten again.
It's a little hard to put the importance of the transistor into perspective. One way of looking at it is about 3 billion transistors are made worldwide - a second. Imagine how different the world would be if these transistors were still made manually with vacuum tubes (or not made at all.)
While you read this post, about 20 transistors were manufactured for every person in the world.
might I recommend this book by Bo Lojek. Its a great history of how it all happened with a lot of technical detail. English is not Bo's first language but that is not an issue as its the technical detail and the science that carries this book.
Headline from February 7, 2496:
Nearly 5 centuries after it was predicted, Moore's Law has finally come to an end. Having nothing to report, Slashdot's servers collapsed in a puff of 2048-qubit floating point reals.
... more on that later. But first, President Bush CXXIII was seen picking his nose in public...
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There's a taste for everything, but there's no denying that transistors make sound that's closer to the original, same as a hotel room is closer to the room where you (OK, most people...) sleep at home.
Actually, one of the tube amplifiers biggest shortcomings, its high distortion, is one of the reasons why tubes are still used for a niche application: guitar amplifiers. The distortion caused by the tubes has been incorporated in the sound people expect of guitars, I suppose that's what you mean by "warm-sounding".
Bipolar?
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
From that to this? Far out, man.
We rock!
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Beowulf cluster of those!
... the Internet would be just an array of tubes.
"Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!"
The "Virtual Tube" DSP amps do not sound the same.
Of course they don't, because nobody would build something which can amplify sound almost flawlessly, only to degrade the sound with artificial tube amplifier artifacts. The audionuts would still not buy it because it wouldn't glow in the dark and it would have those evil unsmooth bits inside.
Happy Birthday Transistor!
and deaf people..for transistors ^^
You've just professed belief in something verging on a Randi challenge in a Slashdot discussion.
Would you like an oxygen-free, 99.999% pure woven copper blindfold and gold-plated cigarette?
First city to utilize transistors successfully
technocity
The Roswell UFO Incident involved the recovery of materials near Roswell, New Mexico, USA, on July 7, 1947.
On 16 December 1947, William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain succeeded in building the first practical point-contact transistor at Bell Labs.
Coincidence?
You can't fool me! You're just PRETENDING to be a conspiracy theorist!
All the conspiracy theorists on the Web are really GOVERNMENT AGENTS! You're all just PRETENDING to be conspiracy theorists, to distract us so we don't notice your GREAT CONSPIRACY!
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
A nice, warm sleeping bag in a tent that you carried in your backpack is better than any hotel room.
Right up until the next morning when you wish you had a hot shower and room service.
In the world of vacuum tube failure modes, filament burnout isn't very high on the list. One exception is series-string filament setups (most TVs, some radios) where production variances in heaters inevitably cause one or more tubes to experience an excessive voltage drop. Excessive voltage can considerably shorten heater life. Problem is, like series-string Christmas lights - when one heater burns out, the whole string (often every tube in the chassis except for the rectifier) goes dark. Interestingly enough, insufficient heater voltage can also cause a tube to fail, through a process known as cathode stripping
More commonly, tubes fail for other reasons including depletion of the cathode (loss of emission), contamination of the grid(s) (with material from the cathode), gas contamination (offgassing of internal elements, seal failure), shorts between internal elements or fracture of the envelope.
So, just because the light is on, doesn't mean anyone is home
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
"Imagine a Beowulf movie made using these!"
Because they prefer the distortion induced which sound to them more "warm" "sweet" or whatever adjective they want to qualify it, in comparison to digital processing, which has different set of distortion. But in the very end, whether one is better than the other for an everyday use (aka : not 1kw amplification) is a question of what attribute you are looking at. And as far as I know, for convenience/portability and quality of sound reproduction in comparison to the original nothing beat digital (and that is not even counting the new vinyl which are saved from a digitally processed signal to start with...).
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Lilienfeld never made an actual device. In EE and applied physics you don't get credit for inventing something if you were never actually able to make it. Moreover, the reason Lilienfeld wasn't able to make one was because he didn't know the underlying physics. He couldn't have: quantum mechanics wouldn't even be around for a couple of years. So, here we have someone who never made a device and didn't really even understand what was going on theoretically. Oh yeah, and he filed a patent, but never published otherwise. I'd say that he deserves a footnote, but nothing more.
And yeah, I feel a little sympathy for Mataré and Welker. However, the sad fact is that they made their transistor a full two months after Bell Labs. Regardless of whether it was done independently of Bardeen, Shockley, and Brittain, they were second. I'd say that history got it right.
I'm old enough to remember the "glow" of the old tube devices. I worked in a television repair shop in the 70's and remember working on these beasts. Many a finger was singed replacing some of these suckers. Many times I would have a old 6U10 tube fail, causing the 6LQ6 output tube to run away and actually glow cherry red hot! An awesome site to watch, but then the pain of waiting for it to cool down enough to pull out and replace. I miss the days of soldering tube connections back together, removing dead mice or other critters who crawl inside those boxes to keep warm in the winter, then get zapped on the high voltage transformers. Ahhhhh.....the good old days ;)
I have a 45 year old amp on a shelf with distortion figures bettering any scientifically proven metric for audibility at normal listening levels. The distortion argument became invalid with the introduction of the Williamson circuit (a very long time ago.)
Googling the phrase "vacuum microelectronics" is quite informative. Or just look at a plasma screen TV, which is actually an array of tiny gas switching tubes. A good introduction to the field is here:
http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/People/Grad_Students/botis/documents/papers/243_botis.pdf
When tubes get that small, one no longer needs high voltages and heated cathodes to achieve electron emission. The electrostatic field and a tiny emitter point will work just fine. If solid state never came around, who knows what kind of tube-based electronics might have been developed.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Gawd, this rewritten history bugs me to no end. It's an absolute insult to the people who did the original research, patents AND products before the Silicon Transistor came along.
I thought I was going to have to correct the article by pointing out that AT&T didn't invent the transistor. I'm glad to see someone else has beaten me to the punch. Thank you.
Sorry, but you have absolutely no idea of what you're talking about.
Transistors were used in production, in World War II, long before AT&T came up with the Silicon Transistor.
For one reference, see "A Different Kind of War" by Commodore Miles. There are other books and articles around from that period which also reference the transistor.
So, while Lilienfeld may not have built one at the time of his patent (and that's questionable as well), others were building, using and selling them long before AT&T decided to take credit for the entire thing.
Thats the best description of [insert random microsoft product] i've ever seen.
Now, where are my mod points?
Transistors are really amazing devices. Imagine how big an iPod Nano would be if you had to make it using vacuum tubes! I guess you'd need a whole power plant just to keep it alive! And it wouldn't even work, because the tubes are too slow.
-- Cheers!
You do realize that transistors were being made by the early 40's, don't you? They were even sold to the military during WWII, long before AT&T stole the credit.
See my attribute elsewhere in this thread if you're interested. But there are numerous stories of transistors being used long before 1947.
Quoting Gordon Moore as "Every year we make on the order of 1,017 transistors. That's a one followed by 17 zeros."
Is anybody proofreading at Forbes.com?
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In the old AA5 All american five radio's there was a #47 6 volt lamp used to illuminate the dial in parallel with 1/2 of the filament of the rectifier... usually a 35Z5. Also the DC voltage (B+)ran through this lamp too If the lamp burns out then that upsets the voltage distribution and will burn out the rectifier tube.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
While this may be true, how many other racist Nobel laureates of that era can you name? How many left such a bad aftertaste in the mouth of history? Maybe a lot of them held those beliefs in private, but Shockley became more famous for his racism than for his Nobel. He was almost like the Barry Bonds of Nobel Prizewinners- he didn't just win a Nobel, he proceeded to tack a big fat asterisk on it. At least Barry needed his asterisk injected in his butt to get his baseball in the first place. Shockley didn't even have that excuse.
Having won a Nobel Prize myself as far as you know, let me tell you how this works.
You will be amazed at how these things change your life- I highly recommend picking one up. Usually it means you're set for life. You get automatic Respect with a capital "R" wherever you go. You're invited to all the banquets and dinners, people want to be photographed standing next to you, anything associated with you gets lavishly funded, and you can pocket a few grand a night by reading crap speeches at podiums. You get your picture taken at Google headquarters (if you have time), and then Larry and Sergey will brag about meeting YOU- not the other way around. As John Cockcroft put it (Physics, 51), "When I look round this great hall I feel that I have been transported into a magical world by the genie of Alfred Nobel." And it really feels like that. Of course, the euphoria never lasts, but whether the Respect remains is up to you. It turns out that winning a Nobel Prize comes with its own list of DOs and DON'Ts.
Hmmmmm..... Didn't that spaceship crash in Roswell a few months before that in 1947 ? Something to think about ......
Or when you wake up in two feet of snow.
It is always easier to backwards engineer electronic devices, than to invent your own. And it's not like at the 5 month stage it did anything except demonstrate that the principle worked. It took years more work to make a practical product out of the alien technology we found at Roswell. This is why there are 1,000 knock offs of the ipod and new phones inside of 4 months in China every time.
Actually most dead tubes do not look significantly different to when they were working. Generally the heater does not go open circuit so you still get the cheerful red glow. However if the tube has lost emmission it will not work in the circuit. It may also have internal shorts between any of the elements, which of course will stop it working.
The most common failure that is visible is not actually the heater going, it is loss of vacuum. This can be seen because the getter (silvery patch on the inside of the glass) will turn white.
Battery valves which worked with low voltage low current filaments were more prone to going open circuit, but since you could not see any glow normally you could not tell if they had a problem. Add this to the fact that they often ran all the heaters in a set in series like Christmas tree lights, and you had a trap for the new player since you had to figure out which one was gone.
Gosh, makes me feel old....