Although my great-grandmother wouldn’t remember, about 60 years ago, three researchers built the world’s first transistor. At the time, no one seemed to care, but in just years, transistors were everywhere. The invention of the tiny device is somehow similar to our ancestors’ inventing the wheel. Man and the whole world changed a lot after these two things were invented. We wouldn’t have been chatting, emailing and surfing the Internet, if the three Bell Labs researchers hadn’t built the transistor.

So, yesterday, December 16, 2007, the transistor celebrated its 60-year anniversary. William Shockley, John Bardeen and William Brattain were the three scientists at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, who built the world’s transistor in 1947. However, although they were so sure that this semiconductor amplifier represents one of the greatest inventions of their times, the world wasn’t too thrilled about it. After six months of further experiment and research, the three scientists were sure enough that their small device is ready to take the place of the huge vacuum tubes that made radios and other electronic gadgets so bulky, hot and power hungry.

Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain held a press conference on June 30, 1948, and made public their invention. They even showed the world a TV and a radio that were working with transistors in place of vacuum tubes. Although at the time, such things as modern-day computers were considered just sci-fi machines, it was the three Bell Labs researchers’ invention that made possible everything that came up next.

So, although the world wasn’t impressed by the transistor, in just few years technology kept improving, and in the end everybody had to admit the transistor’s qualities. Transistor radios and TVs started to come out and in the 1960s the microprocessor, that is a sequence of transistors on a single wafer of silicon crystal, was invented. Since then, the world has been hurrying more and more, and technology has improved day by day.  

Now, we can’t imagine the world without our powerful computers and gadgets, but we should not forget that if the tiny semiconductor device hadn’t been invented 60 years ago, we wouldn’t have had all of these smart, powerful electronics.