William Shockley and the Invention of the Transistor

Wiliam Bradford Shockley (1910-1989) -along with John Bardeen (1908-1991) and Walter Brattain (1902-1987)- was the father of the transistor, the invention that is probably the greatest silent revolution of the twentieth century, which turns 70 in 2017. The operation of the vast majority of the equipment we use on a daily basis (including televisions, mobile phones and computers) is based on the properties of the transistors with which they are built. It is often said that the transistor represents for the twentieth century what the steam engine meant for the nineteenth century.

Shockley was born in London in 1910 and was originally from the United States. He didn’t have a very happy childhood, to a large extent motivated by the poor relationship between his parents, who were unstable people that were unable to socially relate to their environment. They transmitted this to their son and this shaped his moody and unsociable temper. After his parents returned to the United States, he entered the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1928, where he studied physics, graduating in 1932. He subsequently carried out doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and obtained the title of Doctor in 1936. That same year he began to work at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York, belonging to A. T. & T., the US telecommunications giant.

In 1945, the laboratory director, Mervin J. Kelly, put Shockley in charge of a semiconductor research group, with the idea of developing an amplifier device based on those materials. A. T. & T was very interested in making an amplifier with semiconductors, since they had a serious problem with long distance communications. In a telephone conversation, the voice becomes an electrical signal, a signal that later travels through copper conducting wires. If the signal is travelling a few kilometers, it reaches the receiving device in a clear way; but in US coast to coast communications, the conversation must travel between 6, 000 and 8, 000 km; the electrical signal loses intensity and at a certain distance it must be increased again, an operation that is called amplification and the device that does it is named an amplifier. It is enough to have a sufficient number of amplifiers along the entire line to make it as long as desired. In those years, the amplification was vacuum valves, fragile devices, which consume a lot of power and give off a lot of heat. Kelly concluded that they needed to have a more reliable amplifier device to efficiently perform communications at such a great distance and assumed that the response should be sought in semiconductors, of which they were beginning to find out their properties at that time.

One of the official photographs with which Bell Labs announced the invention of the transistor: Bardeen (left), Shockley (center) and Brattain (right). Although it seems that harmony reigns between the three, this was nothing further from the truth / Image: MLA style: “William B. Shockley – Photo Gallery”. Nobelprize. org. Nobel Media AB 2014.

⇐ Предыдущая 20 21 22 23 242526 27 28 29 Следующая ⇒