Chapters 8 Legislative and Industry Trends

Additional material: Videos 1, 2 & 3

First Transistor

• Bell Lab, 1947

The first working device to be built was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs. The three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement.

How a Transistor Works

• The transistor can function as:
• An insulator
• A conductor
• The transistor's ability to fluctuate between these two states that enables to switch or amplify.
• The transistor has many applications, but only two basic functions: switching and modulation (amplification).
• In the simplest sense, the transistor works like a dimmer.
• With a push the knob of the dimmer, the light comes on and off. You have a switch. Rotate the knob back and forth, and the light grows brighter, dimmer, brighter, dimmer. Than you have a modulator.