Two days before Christmas 1947, Walter Brattain slit a strip of gold foil with a razor blade, pressed it onto a sliver of germanium and heard his own voice come back louder. John Bardeen had drawn the geometry the night before. Their boss, William Shockley, was in the building and not in the room, and he never got over it. The chapter explains the transistor from a copper wire up, then follows Shockley to an apricot orchard in California and the eight young men who walked out on him.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Walter Brattain, John Bardeen, William Shockley, Mervin Kelly, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Eugene Kleiner, Jean Hoerni, Arthur Rock
- The idea it builds
- Conductors, insulators and the doped crystal between them: electrons, holes, the p-n junction as a one-way valve, and amplification by injection.