1954 · East German Germanium Transistor · Work 826 of 1,871
A production room of 1954 in a component works near Berlin, in the foreground on a tin tray rows of dozens of small black metal cups one centimetre high, each with a plain pale yellow band and three straight silvery wire legs, a hand setting one more cup into the row with tweezers, behind at a long pale work table women in white coats and headscarves seen from behind, bent over magnifiers on stands, tall windows with glazing bars, grey winter light from the left, a tiled stove in the corner.
What it was used for
A transistor, developed and manufactured in the research and development department of the VEB Werk für Bauelemente der Nachrichtentechnik "Carl von Ossietzky" at Teltow. The Deutsches Museum archive guide to Matthias Falter's papers records that Falter headed this department and in 1954 took over development leadership for the whole GDR in this field. Frank Dittmann of the Deutsches Museum names a research team under Falter for 1953; Stephan Hloucal writes that the first point-contact transistors were produced in the WBN research department in 1953. Per Dittmann, the first transistor developed at Teltow was presented at the Leipzig Fair in 1954. The later Teltow junction transistors of the OC series served small output stages and preamplifiers; the Industriemuseum Region Teltow exhibits the "Sternchen" pocket radio of 1959 alongside one.
What was new
No priority can be claimed here: the object comes 6 years after the announcement of the point-contact transistor at Bell and 3 years after the first production line at Allentown. What is characteristic is something else - that a works in the GDR made the device from its own development and showed it at the Leipzig Fair, and that development leadership for the whole country lay at this site in 1954. Manufacture grew beyond Teltow: Dittmann reports an expansion of manufacture at Stahnsdorf, and that from 1958 a new plant for series production of semiconductor devices was built at Frankfurt an der Oder. The archive guide names Falter as director of the Institut für Halbleitertechnik at Teltow from 1959 to 1964.
What the sources leave open: Thin. No source reached gives unit numbers, prices or type data for 1954; robotrontechnik.de was unreachable. The Industriemuseum Region Teltow attaches the sentence about the 1954 Leipzig Fair to an OC 816 junction transistor, while radiomuseum.org lists the 1 NC 010 point-contact device as the GDR's first transistor and dates the OC 810 to a WBN datasheet of 1956. No type designation is given here for that reason.