The transistor was not the only possible alternative to the vacuum tube and again, the government funded competitive investigations. If the transistor had been perfected by an organization committed to appropriating every advantage from its innovation, not in making the innovation “public property,” then the subsequent growth in the semiconductor, and all related, including computer industries, would certainly have been very different. This issue will be extensively explored in the next chapter. 61 In AT&T’s case, the fact that it was a monopoly mattered, based on historical practice, but more importantly, it was because AT&T executives truly saw themselves as a service business. Those analyzing Bell Lab’s important open policy conclude Bell Labs knew the transistor was too important to keep to themselves knew they had more to gain than lose from wide-spread use might have suspected that the government would have forced such a policy in any case, especially in light of the Justice Department’s antitrust case filed in 1949 and such a policy was consistent with their past practice. For example, the military was told only one week before the public announcement to prevent them from blocking its release on the grounds of national security they held seminars in the early 1950’s when they shared all they knew about transistor technology and in 1952 they licensed the technology to all comers for a minimum royalty of 5% of sales.
60 (For their achievement, all three received the Nobel Prize.) Public announcement was delayed, however, until later in 1948.įrom public announcement onward, Bell Labs, and thus AT&T, consistently acted to effect wide disclosure and use of transistor technology. Shockley to work out the seminal principle of a solid-state transistor over the following five weeks.
Brattain and John Bardeen, experimentalist and theorist respectively, demonstrated a crude, but working, amplifying transistor made from germanium and wires. It would take over two years, but on December 23, 1947, the first transistor was demonstrated at Bell Telephone Laboratories. 59 Three months later, Bell Labs issued an “Authorization for Work” to investigate making transistors from solid-state materials.
58 The war time scientific culture also encouraged communication and cooperation among all researchers – an example was a “Meeting on Germanium Crystals” held at Bell Labs on Apamong university and industrial laboratory scientists. During World War II, the government significantly increased funding of semiconductor research at Bell Labs, universities and industrial companies, and created MIT Radiation Laboratory to coordinate the research. Once again the government played a major role in pushing theory into practice. 57īut investigators lacked pure enough materials to create semiconductors. And profoundly different than a vacuum tube, a transistor worked not by electrons flowing through voltage gradient, but by channeling them in semiconductor materials. Amplification had two purposes: to let a very small current control a very large one, and to boost signals to overcome circuit noise so signals with information could be detected. Switching on-off made possible the conversion of an analog signal, electricity, to the 0’s and 1’s of a digital signal. Driving and funding the search for an alternative was the military.Ī transistor is a device that accomplishes the two necessary tasks of switching on-offand amplification. 56 Everyone knew an alternative had to be found to vacuum tubes if computers were to be made more reliable, faster, smaller, and consume less power and generate less heat. The transistor was the first of three technological discontinuities to radically alter the dynamics and structure of the computer market-structure.
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