![]() In the latter half of the 20 th century, the potential for better electronics seemed virtually limitless. Scientists quickly figured out that silicon was the perfect material for transistors-it made cheap, precise, and easily miniaturizable devices. Once transistors took off, though, electronics never looked back. These were hard to manufacture and hard to miniaturize (the world’s first general-use digital computer weighed 30 tons), partly because they depend on maintaining a perfect vacuum. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the transistor changed the world.īefore the transistor, TVs and radios ran on vacuum tubes. Transistors form the basis of modern electronics we stamp out millions at a time, and they could all fit on the end of a pin. Today, we know this device as the transistor. The dime-sized contraption, cobbled together out of germanium and gold, turned out to be the reason why you can get email from a person halfway around the world, look up restaurant reviews on your phone, and get driving directions from your car. Three scientists at AT &T’s Bell Laboratories in New Jersey were tinkering with a device that would turn an electrical signal on and off. The seed didn’t look that impressive, at least not next to the flashier rockets for outer space that other scientists and engineers were building at the same time. That was also the year the seed that would eventually grow into smartphones first took root. In 1947, the Cold War, David Letterman, and the CIA were born the future Queen Elizabeth got married and a U.S. This story was originally published in volume 7, issue 1 of Argonne Now, the laboratory’s semiannual science magazine. Or how basic science today drives the electronic marvels of tomorrow ![]()
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