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The transistor grew out of a "parlor trick" in Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1940. One of the scientists there "had a little chunk of black stuff with a couple of contacts on it," recalls Bell Physicist Walter H. Brattain, "and when he shone a flashlight on it, he got a voltage. I didn't believe it." But Brattain never forgot, and seven years later (a delay enforced by the war), using the same "black stuff"—silicon—in an electrolytic solution, he got the same effect: a current was produced ten times as great as that from any other photoelectric device. A few months later they achieved the "transistor effect," a greatly amplified signal, using only a sliver of germanium and three wires.
Bell pulled scientists out of other departments until a research team of some 40 men—physicists, chemists, metallurgists, engineers—was working at top speed on a project to find out just why the current was amplified. They did, and on June 30, 1948, Bell, with its usual modesty, issued the scientific understatement of the decade: "The Bell Telephone Laboratories wishes to demonstrate today a new device. Its essential simplicity indicates the possibility of widespread use." For finding out why, Brattain and two theoretical physicists, William Shockley and John Bardeen, won a Nobel Prize.
The miracle of the transistor is that it can do virtually everything the vacuum tubes—for nearly 40 years the mainstay of the communications industry—could do, and do it better. It is more reliable, sturdier, and only a fraction of the tube's size. Today a full third of Bell Labs' scientists are working on the transistor and the whole new family of "solid state" electronic devices it has spawned. The transistor not only made space exploration possible; it also ushered in the new technique of miniaturization, thus made hundreds of new products possible.
The Computer Is Born. It was the transistor, with its minuscule size and swiftness, which made possible the modern computer, perhaps the second greatest postwar new product. While shrinking in size, computers have vastly increased their speed and ability to handle problems. The fastest, IBM's $13.5 million STRETCH model, can add two 15-digit numbers in an incredible two-millionths of a second.
In fact, computer progress has outrun man's ability to prepare magnetic-tape instructions complex enough to keep the brains busy. The ideal computer would be one that operators can instruct verbally. Bell plans to build one able to hear and obey some 50 words.
The next step is machines that can do more than answer just yes or no; they would, in effect, reason by considering alternatives, reach "under the circumstances" conclusions. Bell has already reconstructed a neuron, the basic element of the human brain, electronically, will ..try linking several together in a "neural net" duplicating nerve tissue. Eventually they hope to devise a computer able to freely associate ideas. IBM and others are trying to control molecules to work as a new kind of transistor, make a computer whose components will "feel" each other's information, come to qualitative decisions.