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The transistor, the ubiquitous building block of all electronic circuits, will be 65 years old on Sunday. The device is jointly credited to William Shockley (1910-1989), John Bardeen (1908-1991) and Walter Brattain (1902-1987), and it was Bardeen and Brattain who operated the first working point-contact transistor during an experiment conducted on 16 December 1947.
Yet this now ubiquitous device – these days more as an element in silicon chip design than as a discrete component – has a history that goes back to the mid-1920s.
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