Walter brattain autobiography range

Walter Brattain, who spent much of his youth in Tonasket, was named co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956 for inventing the transistor.

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For most of the 20th century, AT&T was almost entirely responsible for building and operating America’s telephone infrastructure. It manufactured the phones and electrical redskap, laid hundreds of millions of miles of wire across the country, and built and operated the switchboards and exchanges that made it possible for anyone with a phone to call anyone else.

This huge network required billions of dollars worth of equipment: telephones, switches, cables, amplifiers, repeaters, and so on. All this utrustning was built by AT&T’s manufacturing subsidiary, Western Electric. But it was designed and developed by AT&T’s research ledd, Bell Telephone Laboratories, better known as Bell Labs.

To students of technological progress, Bell Labs is a giant. For decades, Bell Labs was considered not only the best industrial research lab in the world, but arguably the best research lab in the world, period. One Bell Lab alumnus described it as “a parallel organization to alm

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How Europe Missed The Transistor

In late 1948, shortly after Bell Telephone Laboratories had announced the invention of the transistor, surprising reports began coming in from Europe. Two physicists from the German radar program, Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker, claimed to have invented a strikingly similar semiconductor device, which they called the transistron, while working at a Westinghouse subsidiary in Paris.

The resemblance between the two awkward contraptions was uncanny. In fact, they were almost identical! Just like the revolutionary Bell Labs device, dubbed the point-contact transistor, the transistron featured two closely spaced metal points poking into the surface of a narrow germanium sliver. The news from Paris was particularly troubling at Bell Labs, for its initial attempts to manufacture such a delicate gizmo were then running into severe difficulties with noise, stability, and uniformity.

So in May 1949, Bell Labs researcher Alan Holden made a sortie t