3/30/2023 0 Comments Who invented the transistorAll were required to put out $25,000 as “a down-payment on a license.” Sensing the potential of the new device, the Department of Defense awarded a number of multi-million dollar contracts for transistor research contracts. The first was for government and military officials only, while twenty-five American companies and ten foreign companies attended the second. So in 19, Bell Labs put on two symposiums revealing all their information on the transistor. But some of the Bell Labs employees were already jumping ship with the technology and the anti-trust action was an indication that any patent infringement cases would be hard to defend in court. It did not want to antagonize the Justice Department over a technology it did not fully understand nor knew how to implement commercially. Unlike its previous history of zealously controlling or acquiring any patents (including the vacuum tube) dealing with its telephone network, AT&T decided to liberally license out the new technology. Faster to react, less fragile, less power-hungry, and cooler-running than glass vacuum tubes (which had to “warm up” to operating temperatures), it ideal for a wide variety of electronic devices. It operated much like the vacuum tube but the transistor however was “solid-state”: easier to use, more reliable, and much smaller as well. The action came after, although not necessarily because of, the telephone company’s invention of the transistor, an electronic device that regulated the flow of electricity through a small cylinder device. In 1949 it sought the divestiture of Western Electric, AT&T’s equipment-manufacturing arm. In any case, the government’s lawsuit meant that AT&T would tread lightly with this new invention lest it raise additional concerns about Ma Bell’s monopoly power.Īfter World War II, the US Justice Department filed another anti-trust lawsuit against AT&T. The development of the transistor was not a result of just basic research it was the result of an all-out attempt to find something to replace the vacuum tube. One of its major challenges was to find a more efficient successor to the vacuum tube.Ī breakthrough occurred when William Shockley, PhD, who was the director of transistor research for Bell Labs worked with fellow PhDs John Bardeen and Walter Brattain to create the “Semiconductor amplifier Three-electrode circuit element utilizing semiconductive materials.” The transistor’s inception dates to Decemat Bell Labs’ facilities in Murray Hill, New Jersey.Īt the time, AT&T’s famed research facility employed nearly 6,000 people, with 2,000 being engineering and research professionals. Fed by AT&T’s monopoly profits, Bell Labs became a virtual “patent factory”, producing thousands of technical innovations and patents a year by the 1930s. ( Bell Labs) in 1925 as a research and development subsidiary. Patents, as government sanctioned barriers to entry, created huge obstacles for other competitors and effectively barred them from producing and using anything close to the restricted technology.Īs AT&T grew more powerful, it established Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc. For example, AT&T purchased the patents for the De Forest vacuum tube amplifier in 1915, giving it control over newly emerging “wireless” technologies such as radio and transatlantic radiotelephony, as well as any other technology that used the innovation to amplify electrical signals. A document known as the Kingsbury Commitment spelled out the new structure and rules of interconnection in return for AT&T divesting its controlling interest in telegraphy powerhouse Western Union.īoth companies had a history of consolidating their market domination through patent creation or purchase. The agreement established the company, started with Alexander Graham Bell’s technology, as an officially sanctioned monopoly. In 1913, AT&T settled its first federal anti-trust suit with the US government. The transistor emerged from the research efforts of AT&T, the corporate behemoth that was formed by JP Morgan and guided by US policy to become the nation’s primary telecommunications provider. This led to the “solid state” electronics revolution and then to many silicon semiconductor innovations that led to the rapid development of computerized information technology. An unlikely scenario unfolded in the 1950s when AT&T’s fear of government anti-trust action and regulation sparked the sharing of this seminal technology with other companies. It was initially used for amplifying electromagnetic frequencies and then for switching the 1s and 0s needed for digital computing. The invention of the transistor in 1947 provided an extraordinary capability to control an electrical current.
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