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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.
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.
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.
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.
"Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!"
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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At UTC 13:16 on Sunday 16 December you write about an event on 16 December 1947... Coincidence?
You write this in 2007 and mention a UFO incident on 7/7 1947... Coincidence?
2 posts about this subject appear on this page, one enumerating 2 points and the other mentioning 2 dates, and these posts appear 22 minutes apart... Coincidence?
I think not. Clearly this can't be coincidence. Clearly you're an alien pretending to be a conspiracy theorist.
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.
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
I would say this- the transistor led to virtually all modern electronics. In fact, it is the basis of our modern life and economy. Without it, we could not possibly be where we are today. While tubes may indeed have been the size of the original transistor in 1947/1948, there is no way it could have miniaturized at the rate transistors have- in fact, there is most likely a hard limit to the smallest tube size. Finally, the transistors importance over tubes was that it acted as a miniaturized amplifier. Its true value lay in its ability to facilitate digital (Boolean) logic, which led us to develop computers. The transistor is the single-most important invention of the human race in the last 100 years, and perhaps even the last 200 (though good arguments could be made for penicillin/antibiotics).
Indeed. I didn't realize until about 5 years ago that relays are still used in safety-rated applications such as train control and power control logic.
These "vital relays" are made today by Union Switch and Signal
and Alstom.
Certain applications, which by law must use safety-rated components, include relays.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
In fact, it is a spiral, just like the 'loop' in most lightbulbs that you can see is a spiral. The simple reason for that is that there isn't room enough in a small triode to pack in the wire as a continuous segment at the voltage that the filaments run at the currents are high enough that you need an appreciable length of wire to get to the required resistance.
Just for you I've dug you up a picture of what an early model heater would have looked like:
http://www.thevalvepage.com/valvetek/heater/fig4.gif
and a few more recent types:
http://www.thevalvepage.com/valvetek/heater/fig5.gif
The two types of tubes that are still in common use either use the tungsten filament as described above (typically for higher power applications) or an indirect system where the heating filament is 'wrapped' by a small tube coated with some oxide, in this case the electron emission is secondary.
Slasdot was labelled 'news for nerds', last I checked, and your remark about the 'hot cathode' being
in contrast to there being no filament at all does not contradict anything I said before.
Also, it's hard to tell one anoymous coward from another.
Have a really nice day.
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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!
hello again, mr. Anonymous.
/.
/. has lots of people that already know how vacuum tubes work, but there are also plenty of folks that haven't got a clue what a vacuum tube even is. For those that already know I really doubt I could teach them anything worth knowing (yourself ?), for the rest, people that can't remember a time before the CD and the chip a device made of glass and bits of wire that you could build a computer out of must be a pretty weird idea.
> Please I urge you, you seem smart but are mysteriously stuck with many misconceptions.
So from being an idiot I now 'seem smart' ? I guess that's an improvement. Who knows where it will lead...
> Perhaps you are self-taught. Commendable, but it's never OK to just assume what you know is gospel truth; investigate and keep learning, always be ready to discard notions proven wrong.
Let me urge you a bit in return: (and btw thanks for the electron micrographs of the lightbulb, that was really nice and interesting stuff.)
Lighten up a bit.
If you really want to teach someone (anyone) then you should try not to come off as a total asshole, snipe attacks, dragging in everything but the kitchen sink to prove yourself, getting yourself worked up into a raging frenzy (by your own admission).
That's not how I remember any of the people that ever taught me.
Especially not whilst being anonymous at the same time, that's simply not nice. Most people don't even bother to read at the level where they can see your writings, they didn't call the 'guest' account 'anonymous coward' for nothing here. I'm out here with my name in full public view, 3 seconds of googling and you know who I am and what I do for a living (and after reading this how I got there) and if you're clever where I live and what my home phone # is.
You're hiding behind a screen of anonymity and sniping at me by poking holes in something that was kept fairly simple on purpose to demonstrate your 'superiority'. But my initial writing was perfectly sufficient given the situation. In other words, you may know more but you are not very tactful, instead of expanding on what I wrote and recognizing that what I wrote was a simplified view of how things work in a tube, if you feel that there is a need for that (but not the be-all-end-all 100% optimized for production situation in a tube) and if you felt so inclined you could have simply expanded on it without making it personal.
This is not the annual ARRL get together, this is
Making things personal whilst being an AC is not a mode of discussion that will make you my friend any time soon.
That sort of attitude tends to impede the flow of information. You come across as a *very* frustrated old guy, that thinks he's due some respect because of his age and knowledge that landed here by accident, and the more you refer to your books from 1962 and your vintage TEK (guess what, I have one too, well maybe not that much of a vintage one, a really neat dual trace, it even had a calibration certificate when I got it but it is most certainly out of 'spec' by now, it was moved several times internationally, but I did give one of the not very portable modular ones to my kid to take apart (it was gone beyond salvage, unfortunately, too many bits were missing)) the more you confirm that image.
By analogy, if I explain to my son how a car engine works, you would come and stand next to me to tell me in a loud and belligerent voice how I know nothing about car engines because I left out the oil pump and am showing my ignorance.
No need to complicate that vision by adding in all the bits and pieces that make it manufacturable at a low price or hyper efficient. We didn't address the silver on the legs either did we ? (I'm sure you will now launch in a tirade of how ignorant I am and that it's not really silver if you still don't get my point).
When explaining a transistor to someone you also would not right away start with vacuum deposition techniq
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