8/18/2023 0 Comments Transistor invention![]() ![]() Both Mataré and Welker played crucial roles in this crash R&D program, working at different ends of the war-torn country. In the European case, it was the German radar program that spawned the invention. Brattain in December 1947, the technology that led to the transistron emerged from wartime research on semiconductor materials, which were sorely needed in radar receivers. Or had it?Īs was true for the Bell Labs transistor, invented by John Bardeen and Walter H. They are all young and eager.” And one of these small, aggressive research groups, holed up in a converted house in the nearby village of Aulnay-sous-Bois, had apparently come through spectacularly with what might well be the invention of the century-a semiconducting device that would spawn a massive new global industry of incalculable value. “They have little groups in all sorts of rat holes, farm houses, cheese factories, and jails in the Paris suburbs. “This PTT bunch in Paris seems very good to me,” Holden candidly admitted in his letter. “As we arrived, they were transmitting to a little portable radio receiver outdoors from a transmitter indoors, which they said was modulated by a transistor.”įour days later, France’s Secretary of Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones (PTT), the ministry funding Mataré and Welker’s research, announced the invention of the transistron to the French press, lauding the pair’s achievement as a “brilliante réalisation de la recherche française.” Only four years after World War II had ended in Europe, a shining technological phoenix had miraculously risen from the still-smoldering ashes of the devastation. Shockley, leader of the Bell Labs solid-state physics group. “This business of the French transistors would be hard to unravel, i.e., whether they developed them independently,” he confided in a 14 May letter to William B. So in May 1949, Bell Labs researcher Alan Holden made a sortie to Paris while visiting England, to snoop around the city and see the purported invention for himself. 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. ![]() 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 resemblance between the two awkward contraptions was uncanny. 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. In late 1948, shortly after Bell Telephone Laboratories had announced the invention of the transistor, surprising reports began coming in from Europe.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |