The invention story of the transistor starts with the inception of thermionic triode. The triode invented in 1907 acted as a precursor for transistors. Initially used in radio and telephone, these triodes were quite fragile and power-consuming. In the year 1925, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld manufactured Field Effect Transistor as a replacement for triode. In the year 1934, a German inventor Oskar Heil also designed a similar device. In the year 1947, Bell labs in the United States observed the power generation capacity of crystal germanium on contact with two gold points. This concept was developed further by William Shockley, a solid state physicist. John R. Pierce coined the term transistor as an abbreviation for ‘transfer resistor’. In the year 1947, Walter Brattain, John Bardeen and William Shockley invented the point-contact transistor. It is the first bipolar transistor which revolutionized the semi-conductor field. For this invention, Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were awarded Nobel prize for Physics in the year 1956. The first silicon transistor at the commercial level was produced by Texas instruments in the year 1954.
Transistor
