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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."
As every electrical engineer knows, the frequency response of a transistor-based amplifier can be modified to mimic virtually anything, including tubes. Especially with new-fangled DSP's of today. . .Seriously though, anyone have a good technical paper about why tubes are better suited for some tasks? The only thing I can come up with is their resilience to voltage spikes, cosmic rays, and ability to dimly illuminate the immediate area, not to mention a way to visually detect dead units :-p
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
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.
Makes me wonder how many of todays 'geeks' have ever had a single transistor in their hands, much less done anything useful with it.
Anybody who has held a soldering iron and done something digital with single transistors please raise your hand ? Vacuum tubes ? Relays ?
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This is actually related to one of the major reasons: Power Handling. Vacuum tubes are still used for High Power transmitter amplifiers, much greater than 1kw.
Also: The "Virtual Tube" DSP amps do not sound the same, regardless of what a tone-deaf Electrical Engineer says. Musicians are "Audiophiles" in the derogatory sense you intend, although they usually audiophiles in the true sense of being lovers of sound and music. They may not know EE, but that doesn't mean they don't know anything. Skilled musicians DO know music, and there is a reason they prefer tube amps for Guitars, Bass, etc.
That's more likely because the DSP wasn't programmed properly. A transistor *should* in theory be able to replicate any sound within its frequency range. My guess is that the DSPs aren't correctly accounting for distortions caused by the tubes.
On the other hand, "pro sound" tends to shy away from tube amps these days, because transistor amps have gotten good enough not to be noticeably different, and (more importantly), their gear is usually subject to extremely rough handling that a rack full of glass tubes simply couldn't withstand.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I strongly disagree that the invention of the transistor 'led to all electronics', no offense to your grandad.
The transistor is part of electronics, and electronics was quite well developed by the time the transistor came along. There were already steps towards miniturization using vacuum tubes as small as 3/8" across and only about 3/4" high, which was not that much larger than the first transistors. There were plenty of tubes that carried more than one circuit within the glass enclosure, so in effect they would already be 'integrated circuits' of sorts.
The transistors main contribution was the fact that it was 'solid state', no glow current needed (so much less power consumption, which in turn allowed much further miniaturization) and the fact that they could directly switch current at voltages that could drive devices directly instead of through large bulky transformers. All the rest (thin film, the fet and so on) followed from there but are also just 'chapters' in the book of electronics.
The basics are:
- electromechanics (wiring, switches, relays)
- passive components (resistors, capacitors, coils, diodes, etc)
- active components (transistors, tubes, various variations on the transistor)
- integrated circuits (which is a subbranch of active components)
Relays, interestingly are also 'active' components in a sense.
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Yes, and that reason is marketing. Pure, simple, intensive marketing. Lots and lots of marketing being fed to them throughout their life. Fender and Gibson make the best guitars, Marshal makes the best amps and tubes are better than solid state amps. That's what is constantly being fed to them through implicit and explicit marketing campaigns. Yet, no one can rationally explain why are they better than the others, besides the huge price tag that comes attached to those products and the fact that "OMG my guitar hero uses one of those so it must be excellent.
On the other hand, Brian May made his career playing a guitar that was made from wood taken from a fireplace and some bike parts and it sounds better than any 2.5k euro guitars out there. Makes you think. Or at least it should.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
The transistors main contribution was the fact that it was 'solid state'
I would argue that one of the main contributions of the transistor was that they are not expected to wear out during normal usage. Tubes are not reliable enough to build complicated circuits (e.g. computers) for the mass market out of. Think "one tube failing every two days" like ENIAC, except repeated across millions of desktop PCs.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
You want to know what the problem is? The problem is not technology, or instrumentation, or double-blind tests, or anything remotely rational. It's a religion: people hear what they want to hear, and there's absolutely no arguing with them because their minds are closed. Permanently. You can prove, incontrovertibly, that a given audio waveform is reproduced more accurately by a solid-state amplifier ... but that won't matter. The tube amp just "sounds" better. Now, maybe it does ... but not because it's a better amplifier, but because it is a poorer one!
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.