However, the semiconductor surface trapped electrons, which blocked the main channel from the effect of the external field.ĭespite this initial idea not working out, the issue was solved in 1946. One of the first attempts they made at a transistor was Shockley’s semiconductor triode, which was made up of three electrodes, an emitter, a collector and a large low-resistance contact placed on a block of germanium.

William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain were part of a semiconductor research subgroup working out of the labs. The inventors were three physicists working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, USA. The official invention of a working transistor was in 1947, and the device was announced a year later in 1948. With only theoretical ideas, this also did not become the first field effect transistor. In 1925 Julius Lilienfeld of Austria-Hungary filed a patent, but did not end up releasing any papers regarding his research on the field-effect transistor, and so his discoveries were ignored.Īgain, in 1934 German physicist Oskar Heil’s patent was on a device that, by applying an electrical field, could control the current in a circuit. Two patents were filed in the 20s and 30s for devices that would have been transistors if they had ever reached past the theoretical stage. As an extension of this, there was an awareness of conductors.įollowing on from this, semiconductors accompanied the birth of the AC-DC (alternating current – direct current) conversion device, the rectifier, in 1874. Going way back to when Ohm’s Law was first discovered in 1820s, people had been aware of circuits and the flow of current. So that’s some modern context, but have you ever wondered when the transistor was invented? Or what it looked like? Pre-transistor technology Their main function is to switch or amplify the electrical current in a circuit, and a modern device like a smartphone can contain between 2 and 4 billion transistors. Transistors are a vital, ubiquitous electronic component.

First transistor computer invented