The Story of a Photo: Transistor
Susan Sontag wrote substantially on photography and its revealing, sometimes even interpreting objectives. On the difference between a painter and a photographer, she said,
“the painter constructs, the photographer discloses’’.
So the claim that one of the most productive teams of the 20th century ruptured because of a single photo might be an exaggeration, but it perhaps discloses some truth. John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain were members of the team who invented one of the most revolutionary inventions in human history, i.e. transistors.
Shockley was the leader of the Solid State Physics group at Bell Labs with an assignment of building a vacuum tube alternative for improving Bell’s telephone system throughout the country. Shockley, who recently came back from the mission of training program for B-29 bomber pilots, proposed using an external electrical field on a semiconductor to affect its conductivity. However, months of attempts at this idea proved unsuccessful until Bardeen suggested using surface states that prevented the field from penetrating the semiconductor. Eventually, Bardeen’s proposal resulted in the successful production of point-contact transistors.
The first cracks in this collaboration appeared when Bell Labs’ attorneys concluded that they could not include Shockley’s name on the patent since Shockley was not the first to propose the field-effect idea. Infuriated by this decision, Shockley independently and secretly worked on the idea of using junctions instead of point contact. This effort ended in the invention of bipolar junction transistors. Receiving recognition and publicity after Comstock Prize in Physics, Shockley’s name was often solely associated with transistors in the media. Annoyed by the media coverage, Bardeen left Bell Labs for academia, and Brattain moved to another group. Shockley later left Bell Labs and established the first cornerstones of today’s Silicon Valley.
Perhaps, the next photo they took together was at the Nobel prize ceremony in 1956 when they were jointly awarded the Nobel prize in physics; a ceremony which happened again for Bardeen in 1972. The triplet recreated Picture 1 in 1972, called ``Return to Result’’. It is held under Granger licence.
The invention of the transistor shifted the culture radically, from community gatherings in wealthy neighbours’ houses for watching a movie to the autonomy of tiny devices in school kids’ pockets. Transistors, moreover, shifted the culture, process, and function of photography. It provided a better understanding of semiconductor physics which contributed to the invention of CCD in Bell Labs. In 1975, Kodak built the first digital still camera(DSLR) using a Fairchild 100×100 pixel CCD.
Transistors and their grandchildren, the modern-day-ICs, also brought about today’s smartphones. Nowadays, the selling point of smartphones is their cameras: advanced, portable, and equipped with AI assistant corrections. The availability of cameras has further substantially transformed the public discourse from words to photos. To conclude with another Sontag’s quote,
“[…] Mallarmé said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
References:
- Riordan, M., & Hoddeson, L. (1997). The Moses of Silicon Valley. Physics Today, 50(12), 42–47.
- Sontag, S. (2001). On photography (Vol. 48). Macmillan.
- Wikipedia entry on Transistor
Originally published at https://github.com.
