The Transistor: Foundation of Modern Electronics
At their core, transistors are ultimately just electric switches. It is activated with an electric signal, and can be told to act either as a conductor and allow electricity to flow, or as an insulator, stopping the flow of electricity. Having the ability to do both requires special materials called semi-conductors (silicon is probably the most famous example of such materials). The utility of transistors over the previous methods revolutionized electronics, and have become ubiquitous in electronics.
Although various similar predecessors to the modern transistor were created throughout the first few decades of the 20th century, the first true transistor was created in 1947, by a team working at Bell Labs in New Jersey, something they would go on to win a Nobel Prize in physics for in 1956 (the name transistor supposedly came from a contraction of the term transresistance, an important aspect of a transistors abilities). This invention sparked a massive boom in electronics research. Originally, transistors would be made as individual electronic components, as they were greatly superior to the vacuum tubes in use at the time. They were smaller, used less power, and could be used to make more complex circuits, but this direction soon plateaued as individual transistors could not keep up with the demands. In 1958 scientists working for Fairchild Camera and Texas Instruments came up with what they called an integrated circuit. This circuit involved placing several transistors on a single piece of semiconductor material, along with other electronic components such as resistors and diodes. Since this invention, the number of transistors that can be placed on a single integrated circuit has been doubling approximately ever 1.5–2 years, a process dubbed “Moore’s Law”, named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of the Intel corporation, who wrote a paper on this doubling in 1965.
As was mentioned earlier, the transistor is the foundation of most modern electronics. Their sheer usefulness caught the attention of the military, but they were also quickly commercialized. The first transistor radio, the Regency TR-1 was introduced in 1954, with part of the appeal being its small size, something that was only possible due to transistors. A year later, Sony introduced the TR-55, their own version of a transistor radio, and soon were being used in everything from hearing aids to television sets, with the reduction in size and cost, as well as increases in performance caused all of these products to become much more affordable and attractive to consumers. Decades later, the transistor would allow for another revolution to take place, the home computer revolution. Computers had gone from contraptions that took up a whole room and could only be afforded by large organisations to something that most people could afford, with Moore’s law allowing them to become much more powerful then even the most expensive computer of the 60s and 70s. This trend would continue, as transistors allowed for personal electronics like smartphones to become widespread. Without the transistor, or some other invention that performs the same functions, it is unlikely that computing or personal electronics would have become the massive industries they are today. Moore’s law hasn’t stopped yet, and even now transistors are becoming more and more powerful. If there are limits to what can be done with transistors, they have not been reached yet.