Rating: 8.1/10.
Book focused on the history and development of the transistor. It has some overlap with The Idea Factory, but is more focused on the transistor specifically, rather than Bell Labs. The transistor is a rather quiet invention: when Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain first announced it in 1947, it presented as a more efficient amplifier and a replacement for the vacuum tube with niche applications, and nobody expected at that time for it to revolutionize the information age.
The book starts by describing the early lives of the three inventors: Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley. All of them were born in the early 1900s in rural parts of America and displayed signs of exceptional talent in the sciences in their teenage years. By the 1920s, there was a flurry of basic physics discoveries, such as X-rays, the charge and mass of the electron, the existence of the nucleus, particle-wave duality of atomic particles, and quantum mechanics theories. All of them were freshly being developed and challenged at that time, setting the stage for the discovery.
Bardeen and Brattain joined Bell Labs in the 1930s, and at this time there was the earliest research into semiconductors and solid-state physics. The group accidentally discovered that small impurities changed the electrical properties of materials, but it was poorly understood, and the quantum mechanical reasons to explain it were in their infancy. Shockley arrived at Bell Labs during the Great Depression and, armed with deep knowledge of quantum mechanics ahead of everyone else, started applying it to solid-state physics problems and made some headway. The efforts were interrupted by the war in 1940; during the war, they shifted to military applications of the technology, and solid-state amplifiers were useful for sensitive radar systems.
With deepened understanding of silicon doping properties with impurities like boron and phosphorus, they developed the point contact transistor near the end of 1947, demonstrating its properties as an electrical amplifier where the presence of a small voltage controls a much larger current flow. They waited until after Christmas to inform their superior, Kelly, about the discovery.
The internal announcement of the point contact transistor did not include Shockley, causing him to work in isolation for weeks to come up with the junction transistor, a notable improvement over the point contact version. They raced to file patents before other labs and announced it publicly in 1948 as an improved vacuum tube and solid-state amplifier, though it received moderate reception and was buried in the depths of newspaper articles. Bell Labs worked on scaling up production, but there were difficulties with the point contact transistor requiring the growing of high-purity crystals of germanium, and many details of why it would or wouldn’t work were considered black magic. The junction transistor was significantly more reliable, and quickly overtook the point-contact version as the canonical form of the technology.
Bardeen and Brattain were unhappy working under Shockley on the junction transistors since they wanted to do more basic materials research, and they split into a separate group within Bell Labs. By 1951, interest from many parties was growing about the transistor, and Bell Labs decided to license it for $25,000 to anybody who wanted it. It was used in the first transistor computers and radios small enough to fit in your pocket. Sony started manufacturing transistors cheaply for consumer radios, and silicon gradually replaced germanium due to its smaller, more robust temperature variation and switching properties. Another lab invented a diffusion method to produce silicon wafer transistors.
Shockley resigned from Bell Labs after failing to rise through the ranks, and after a brief stint in academia, he recruited several top engineers to found Shockley Semiconductors in California. However, he turned out to be a poor manager and failed to deliver any product to the market, and the group jointly resigned in 1957. During this time, Shockley and the other two won the Nobel Prize in Physics. The group of eight that resigned from Shockley’s company started Fairchild Semiconductors. They developed the first integrated circuits that replaced tedious hand assembly and became massively successful, while Shockley’s company kept working on a more complex Shockley diode, but it was too difficult to manufacture reliably and was a commercial failure.
The legacy of the characters: Shockley eventually became known for his controversial takes on race and intelligence, and he was commercially a failure but credited with recruiting a critical mass of top engineers in California. Fairchild was credited with kickstarting the semiconductor revolution, and according to Moore’s Law (Moore was one of the founding employees), computing power continued to grow exponentially.
