December 17th, 2007 @ 9:53 am
The Transistor’s Birthday
The Transistor’s Birthday - Forbes.com
Sixty years ago, on Dec. 16, 1947, three physicists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., built the world’s first transistor. William Shockley, John Bardeen and William Brattain had been looking for a semiconductor amplifier to take the place of the vacuum tubes that made radios and other electronics so impossibly bulky, hot and power hungry.
Transistor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
On 16 December 1947, William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain succeeded in building the first practical point-contact transistor at Bell Labs.
Hooray for transistors!
Forbes
But the technology kept improving. It got its first consumer application in December 1952 in a hearing aid, where it replaced one of three tubes and lowered battery costs. Then it took off. By 1954 the transistor was in 97% of hearing aids and sales of the devices were up 50%.
I don’t know why, but it seems like more and more things I read about got their big start from the deaf community. Who would have thought that the hearing aid was the first major consumer item to use the transistor? I don’t think it would have been at the top of my list of guesses.
