THE BIRTH OF MODERN ELECTRONICS



Where great ideas really come from. A special report

Perhaps nothing explodes the myth of the Lonely Innovator Hero like the story of modern electronics. To oversimplify a bit, electronics works though the switching of electronic signals and the amplification of their power and voltage. In the early years of the 20th century, switching and amplification was done (poorly) with vacuum tubes. In the middle of the 20th century, it was done more efficiently by transistors. Today, most of this work is done on microchips (large numbers of transistors on a silicon wafer), which became the basic building block of modern electronics, essential for not only computers and cellphones but also products ranging from cars to jetliners. All of these machines are now operated and controlled by -- simply stated -- the switching and amplification of electronic signals.

The dazzling and oversimplified story about electronics goes like this: The transistor was discovered by scientists at Bell Labs in 1947, leading directly to integrated circuits, which in turn led straight to microprocessors whose development brought us microcomputers and ubiquitous cellphones.



The real story is more complicated, but it explains how invention really happens -- through a messy process of copy, paste, and edit. The first transistor was patented 20 years before the Bell Labs scientists, in 1925 by Julius Lilienfeld. In 1947, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen amplified power and voltage using a germanium crystal but their transistor -- the point-contact transistor -- did not become the workhorse of modern electronics. That role has been played by the junction field-effect transistor, which was conceptualized in 1948 and patented in 1951 by William Shockley (seen in next photo). Today, even the Bell System Memorial site concedes that "it's perfectly clear that Bell Labs didn't invent the transistor, they re-invented it."

Moreover, germanium -- the material used in the epochal 1947 transistor -- did not become the foundation of modern electronics. That would be silicon, since the element is roughly 150,000-times more common in the Earth's crust than germanium.

HOW SILICON CHANGED EVERYTHING



This is where another essential invention comes into the story. Semiconductor-grade silicon must be ultrapure before doping, or adding tiny amounts of impurities to change its conductivity.



In order to lower the production costs of silicon wafer, a crystal from which the wafers are sliced must be relatively large. These requirements led to new ways of silicon purification (purity of 99.9999% is common) and to ingenious methods of growing large crystals, both being enormous technical accomplishments in their own right. The story of crystal-making began in 1918 when Jan Czochralski, a Polish metallurgist, discovered how to convert extremely pure polycrystalline material into a single crystal; procedures for growing larger crystals were introduced in the early 1950s by Gordon Teal and Ernest Buehler at the Bell Labs. Soon afterwards Teal became the chief of R&D at Texas Instruments where a team led by Willis Adcock developed the first silicon transistor in 1954.