Like physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley who shared a Nobel Prize for the transistor in 1956. “Brilliant scientists where Bell Labs could really hire the best and brightest.” “Bell Labs had money to hire people in the Great Depression at a time when a lot of universities did not and a lot of companies did not,” Gertner said. Jon Gertner, author of “The Idea Factory.” (Alex Schroeder/Marketplace) “Being a lab that’s connected to a monopoly affords you certain privileges,” said Jon Gertner, author of “ The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.” So it had the stream of funding and gave them a lot of freedom to follow their research noses.” “And three cents out of that dollar went into R&D, mainly at Bell Labs. I’m old enough to remember when we had to pay $1 for the first minute of a coast-to-coast telephone call, called a toll call,” he said. “But it was funded by the American people. “Bell Labs was kind of like a national laboratory in a way,” said physicist Michael Riordan, co-author of the history of the transistor, “ Crystal Fire.” At its height, boy, did it have money – because it was a company with no rival. It was called Bell Telephone Laboratories, the research arm of AT&T.
The first transistor lives at present-day Nokia Bell Labs in New Jersey. This fundamental invention gets us to portable and digital everything. On a campus 45 minutes west of Manhattan, in Murray Hill, New Jersey, researchers on the payroll of a private company figured out how to make an amplifier that didn’t need much power and an on/off switch with no moving parts. The first transistor was a sort of crude metal spring pushing what looks like an arrowhead wrapped in gold foil down into a shard of germanium, the semiconductor, with all of that on top of a metal base. This week, we’re looking at the ecosystems of innovation that turned that invention into … nearly everything. The transistor was born in New Jersey on Dec. The future began 75 years ago this week with the invention of a device that’s seen as the most manufactured item in human history.
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