1954 · Silicon Junction Transistor · Work 823 of 1,871
A demonstration of 1954 on a table with a white cloth in a conference hall in Ohio, a hand in a dark suit sleeve dipping the tip of a flat glossy plain red paddle twenty-three centimetres long into a glass beaker of hot oil on an electric hot plate, at the paddle tip a small circuit board with yellow parts, a white cord with a knot leading to a black plug, beside the beaker a small bronze metal can one centimetre across with three long gold wires lying on a white card, a portable record player with a turning black disc, a table lamp, closed heavy curtains behind.
What it was used for
By its own press release of 10 May 1954, Texas Instruments brought out the first commercial production of silicon transistors, describing them as kernel-sized substitutes for vacuum tubes. The announcement came not in a journal but at the National Conference on Airborne Electronics in Dayton, Ohio, the same day. The advantage lay in the temperature range: per the Computer History Museum, germanium devices were limited to 0 to 70 degrees Celsius, silicon devices worked from minus 55 to 125 degrees. The construction was the same grown junction Sparks and Teal had developed at Bell, in a different material. TI's first journal paper followed 2 months later in the Proceedings of the IRE.
What was new
What was new was the material in a production process, not the principle - and who was first depends on what is counted. Per ETHW, Morris Tanenbaum at Bell Labs achieved amplification in an NPN silicon transistor on 26 January 1954; the same page states cautiously that this may have been the first silicon transistor ever fabricated, and records that Bell Labs kept the achievement secret and decided not to patent it. Tanenbaum himself says in an interview quoted by Michael Riordan that the rate-growing process just was not controllable and did not look attractive from a manufacturing point of view. At TI the laboratory success came on 14 April 1954 and the announcement on 10 May. Tanenbaum presented his results in June 1954; the journal paper appeared only in June 1955, 17 months after the notebook entry. TI then dominated the silicon-transistor market for several years.
What the sources leave open: Teal's 1954 conference paper could not be located. His well-known remark about having a few silicon transistors in his pocket is documented only in a 2004 account by Michael Riordan, 50 years after the event, and is therefore omitted here. The widely repeated $2.50 price appears only in a Computer History Museum day note, not in the quoted press release extract. Sales figures are not documented.
Connections
Every connection names its kind. “Forerunner” on its own would be a claim.