by Jon Gertner
Shockley’s Christmas was a holiday of torment. He left New Jersey at the end of the week for a conference in the Midwest. “On New Year’s Eve I was alone in Chicago between two meetings that came so close together that a return to New Jersey seemed impractical,” he later explained. In fact his mind was afire. Alone in his hotel room, he went to work. “In 2 days I wrote enough to fill a bit more than 19 notebook pages. My notebook was at the Laboratories and I used a pad of paper and mailed the disclosures back to my co-supervisor, S.O. Morgan, who witnessed them and asked Bardeen to do the same. Later these pages were rubber-cemented into my notebook.”19 For the next three weeks, Shockley kept up a furious pace. By late January he had come up with a theory, and a design, for a transistor that both looked and functioned differently than Bardeen and Brattain’s. Theirs had been described as the point-contact transistor; Shockley’s was to be known as the junction transistor. Rather than two metal points jammed into a sliver of semiconducting material, it was a solid block made from two pieces of n-type germanium and a nearly microscopic slice of p-type germanium in between. The metaphor of a sandwich wasn’t far off. Except the sandwich was about the size of a kernel of corn.20
In some respects, Shockley’s idea was illicit. At Bell Labs, there were boundaries, much like surface states, that members of the technical staff were not meant to pass through. Eccentricity—not wearing socks, say, or using company time to build gadgets that had perhaps not even a glancing relationship to the phone business—could be forgiven. Other behaviors could not. MTSs were never to seduce the secretaries. They were not to work with their doors closed. They were not to refuse help to a colleague, regardless of his rank or department, when it might be necessary. And perhaps most important, the supervisor was authorized to guide, not interfere with, the people he (or she) managed. “The management style was, and remained for many years, to use the lightest touch and absolutely never to compete with underlings,” recalls Phil Anderson, a physicist who joined Bell Labs soon after the transistor was developed. “This was the taboo that Shockley transgressed, and was never forgiven.”21 To Addison White, another manager who years before had been a privileged member of Shockley’s solid-state study group, the forces that drove Shockley to compete were clear to those who knew him. White said, “I’ve never encountered a more brilliant man, I think. And he just wasn’t going to sacrifice that in the interests of the members of his group.”22
Shockley kept the design a secret for another month. At a conference with the solid-state group in mid-February, however, a colleague of Shockley’s named John Shive stood up to inform the group about his recent findings that related closely to some of Shockley’s new ideas for the junction transistor. Knowing the alertness of the group—Bardeen and Brattain were in the audience—Shockley sensed that within a few minutes someone would make the leap to propose something akin to the theoretical construct, known as “minority carrier injection,” that he had developed on his own the month before. “From that point on,” he noted, “the concept of using p-n junctions rather than metal point contacts would have been but a small step and the junction transistor would have been invented.”23
So Shockley made the leap, literally. He jumped from his seat and proceeded to give a presentation to the group on his newest theories and design. “I felt I did not want to be left behind on this one,” he recalled. Many of the men were dumbstruck. The solid-state group that Shockley led had been built upon the principles of an open exchange of ideas, and Shockley had apparently ignored those principles. At the same time, it was hard not to be awed—the men were witnessing another breakthrough on the level of Bardeen and Brattain’s earlier work. Did it matter whether it was the product of Shockley’s brilliance and effort, or his cunning and bruised ego?
By Shockley’s calculations, the junction transistor was almost certainly superior to the point-contact transistor as a practical device. But there was a problem. Unlike the point-contact transistor, the junction transistor could not actually be built by anyone at the labs. It was still theoretical. And it looked to be exceedingly challenging for the metallurgists to create the materials—that tiny sandwich of n-p-n germanium. An irony, at least for that moment, was that Shockley’s phantom invention (the junction transistor) had improved upon another invention (the point-contact transistor) that wasn’t useful in any meaningful sense of the word. Lest anyone forget, the point-contact transistor was a device that had never been manufactured, had never been sold, and was still so secret that perhaps only a few dozen people in the world knew it existed.
THE UNVEILING of the two most important technologies of the twentieth century—the atomic bomb and the transistor—occurred almost exactly three years apart. The nuclear test blast at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert took place at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945. It was in many respects a demonstration of the power, and the terror, of new materials; a baseball-sized chunk of purified metal—about eleven pounds of newly discovered plutonium—could level a midsized city.24 The transistor, too, was a demonstration of the power of new materials—less than a gram of germanium containing a slight impurity—but its significance was far less obvious. Its unveiling, a modest affair in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village on June 30, 1948, offered only the most obvious suggestions—the new device was a replacement for the vacuum tube. It was smaller, more rugged, and used less power. The analogy most often used was that the transistor was like a faucet. Rather than water, it could either switch electricity on or off or make it pour out in a torrent. A small turn on the handle, so to speak, could produce big effects.
Ralph Bown, the head of research at Bell Labs who had demanded that Bardeen and Brattain make their transistor circuit oscillate before he would concede its legitimacy, led the conference. Shockley—gifted with a deep, sonorous voice that exuded confidence and calm amusement—handled most of the questions.
Each member of the audience was given a pair of headphones. Bown, tall and elegantly dressed, stood alongside a huge, human-sized replica of a point-contact transistor. The demonstration had three highlights: First, the attendees experienced the amplification properties of the transistor as Bown’s voice was switched (and boosted) through its circuitry. Next, the audience heard a radio broadcast from a set constructed with transistors rather than vacuum tubes. Finally, a transistor was used to generate a frequency tone, thus showing it could oscillate. Bown and his colleagues had spent the past six months considering the potential applications of the transistor. They had no intention of soft-pedaling their device. As the transistor historians Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson would later recount it, Bown told the audience that this “little bitty” thing could do “just about everything a vacuum tube can do, and some unique things which a vacuum tube cannot do.”25
Most newspapers couldn’t discern the value of the tiny device. The New York Times, in a famous lapse of editorial judgment, relegated a report on the West Street demonstration to a four-paragraph mention on page 46, in a column called “The News of Radio.” Oliver Buckley, the Bell Labs president, chose to keep a copy of the Times story, either out of amusement or chagrin, in his personal files until his death. Yet there is little evidence that the Bell scientists were daunted by a perceived lack of excitement. Any apathy on the public’s part was balanced by enthusiasm within the electronics industry, whose executives were given a special presentation soon after the public announcement. Earnest, chummy, beseeching letters—to Bown; to Kelly; to Buckley; to Shockley; to Bardeen; to Brattain; to anyone, in fact, with any connection to the solid-state work—began arriving at Bell Labs from executives in all corners of the electronics business, begging for samples of the new device. RCA wanted one, and so did Motorola, and so did Westinghouse and a host of other radio and television manufacturers. Moreover, the announcement had piqued the interest of the academy, leading professors at Harvard, Purdue, Stanford, Cornell, and a half dozen other schools to request a sample of the device for their own laboratories. “It appears that Transistors mi
ght have important uses in electronic computer circuits,” Jay Forrester, the associate director of MIT’s electrical engineering department, wrote to Bown in July 1948. “In view of this fact, we would like to obtain some sample transistors when they become available in order to investigate their possible applications to high-speed digital computing apparatus.”26 Whether Bown, Shockley, or Kelly had considered how the transistor might be used as a logic circuit in a computer—vacuum tubes were already being used, with mixed success, due to their tremendous energy requirements and fragility—the Forrester letter surely validated such applications. “We are interested that you think the transistor may be useful in connection with computing apparatus,” Bown quickly responded. The men at the Labs, he added, would be happy to hear from the MIT scientists about how the device could be used or improved for computing purposes.27
It was still far too early for the press or the public to visualize how the invention of the transistor might pay off in practical terms. In time, however, the Bell scientists were confident that the public would figure out what the academics, electronics executives, and the Bell scientists already knew. On the day after the unveiling, Buckley had taken out a sheet of stationery to scribble a note to Bell Labs chairman Frank Jewett, now in declining health, who was vacationing at his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. He attached the long news release on the transistor. “The attached press release explains my recent hint of things to come,” Buckley wrote his friend and former boss, who had apparently not been informed about the developments. “This looks very important to us.”
THE LANGUAGE that affixes to new technologies is almost always confusing and inexact. If an idea is the most elemental unit of human progress, what comes after that? For instance, had Brattain and Bardeen made a discovery, or an invention? The distinctions could be real enough. A discovery often describes a scientific observation of the natural world—the first observation of Jupiter’s moons, for example, or the isolation of a bacteria that causes a deadly plague. Also, a discovery could represent a huge scientific achievement but an economic dead end. In the early 1930s, for instance, at the Bell Labs radio facility in Holmdel, New Jersey, a young engineer named Karl Jansky created a movable antenna to research atmospheric noise. With this antenna, he observed a steady hiss emanating from the Milky Way. In this moment, Jansky had essentially started the field of radio astronomy—a discovery that paid a lasting dividend to his and Bell Labs’ renown. On the other hand, it never led to any kind of profitable telecommunications invention or device.28
John Bardeen, the most careful of men, referred to his transistor work as a “discovery” of “transistor action”; he and Brattain had effectively observed in their experiment how a current applied to a slightly impure slice of germanium could hasten the movement of microscopic holes inside and thus amplify a signal. An invention, by contrast, usually refers to a work of engineering that may use a new scientific discovery—or, as is sometimes the case, long-existing ones—in novel ways. Shockley considered the transistor device, in its various forms (both point-contact and junction, for instance), to be an invention. If there was any doubt, he asserted, the legal protections ultimately awarded to these devices verified their status. The U.S. patent office wasn’t in the business of licensing discoveries, only inventions.
To those with an open mind, of course, the transistor could be considered a breakthrough of both science and engineering—in effect both a discovery and an invention. What seemed fair to say, though, was that the transistor was not yet an innovation.
The term “innovation” dated back to sixteenth-century England. Originally it described the introduction into society of a novelty or new idea, usually relating to philosophy or religion. By the middle of the twentieth century, the words “innovate” and “innovation” were just beginning to be applied to technology and industry.29 And they began to fill a descriptive gap. If an idea begat a discovery, and if a discovery begat an invention, then an innovation defined the lengthy and wholesale transformation of an idea into a technological product (or process) meant for widespread practical use. Almost by definition, a single person, or even a single group, could not alone create an innovation. The task was too variegated and involved.
The Labs executives were familiar with the difficulties ahead. Funding and resources necessary for the transistor’s innovation would not be a problem—being attached to the world’s biggest monopoly took care of that. Still, a product like the transistor could ultimately fail for technical reasons (if it proved unreliable) or for manufacturing reasons (if it proved difficult to reproduce consistently or cheaply). Also, it might be the case that there was no market for a new device: Why not continue to keep using vacuum tubes if they remained cheaper and more dependable than point-contact transistors?
In the late 1940s, finding a market for the new device may have been the least of the Labs’ concerns. “If they could be made, they could be sold,” the technology historians Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald noted about the new transistor. “If nobody else bought them, certainly the vast Bell empire itself would form an adequate market.”30 Thus it was the technical and production hurdles that seemed most formidable. And for all its publicity, the new point-contact transistor was useless as a practical device. A wave of the hand or a spell of humidity could alter its performance; it was so delicate and unpredictable that it would sometimes cease working if someone slammed a door nearby. “Making a few laboratory point-contact transistors to prove feasibility was not difficult,” Ralph Bown explained. “But learning how to make them by the hundreds or thousands, and of sufficient uniformity to be interchangeable and reliable, was another problem.”31 By Kelly’s orders, the transistor’s innovation involved a handoff from Shockley’s group in the research department to a team in the Labs’ much larger development department. The development expert who was chosen for this responsibility—a brilliant, bullying, hard-drinking engineer named Jack Morton—not coincidentally had the admiration of both Kelly and Shockley. Morton, then thirty-five years old, had arrived at Bell Labs, like so many others, from a small midwestern school in the mid-1930s. Morton remembered a meeting with Kelly, who called him into his office in the midsummer of 1948 to say, “Morton, I think you know something about transistors. Don’t you?” Morton summoned his courage and replied that he knew they were pretty important.
“No time to waste,” Kelly told him. “I’m going to Europe for the next month, Morton, and when I get back I’d like to see your recommendations as to how we should go about developing this thing. Goodbye.”32
Morton would eventually think more deeply about the innovative process than any Bell Labs scientist, with the possible exception of Kelly. In his view, innovation was not a simple action but “a total process” of interrelated parts. “It is not just the discovery of new phenomena, nor the development of a new product or manufacturing technique, nor the creation of a new market,” he later wrote. “Rather, the process is all these things acting together in an integrated way toward a common industrial goal.”33 One of Morton’s disciples, a Bell Labs development scientist named Eugene Gordon, points out that there were two corollaries to Morton’s view of innovation: The first is that if you haven’t manufactured the new thing in substantial quantities, you have not innovated; the second is that if you haven’t found a market to sell the product, you have not innovated.34 But these realizations would come together later. After hearing Kelly’s orders to produce a road map for transistor production, Morton spent the next twenty-nine days in a state of terror. On the thirtieth he settled on a development plan.
BY THE SUMMER OF 1949, Morton’s team, in conjunction with the Labs’ metallurgists, had fabricated five thousand working germanium transistors. Many were given to the military or as complimentary samples to academics. Nearly a thousand were used at Bell Labs to study the properties of germanium. To Morton, the essential challenges in manufacturing the devices were “reliability,” “reproducibility,” and “designability.” He plan
ned to set up a production line at a Western Electric plant in Pennsylvania, but before that could happen he had to improve the consistency of the germanium. One problem with the early devices was that the germanium was cut from a polycrystalline ingot. In this ingot, the multiple crystals created imperfections within the structure that compromised transistor performance. The ideal material to slice up for transistors would be a perfect single crystal, with all the atoms in the germanium arranged in symmetrical and uninterrupted order, like apple trees stretching hither and yon in an infinite orchard. The problem was that nature didn’t provide perfect single crystals.
In late 1949, the Bell Labs metallurgist Gordon Teal had an idea of how to make large single crystals of germanium in a device he designed that resembled a drill press. By dipping a tiny “seed” of pure germanium into a “melt” of the element, and then slowly, gently “pulling” it from the melt, Teal believed he could fabricate a large and perfect crystal that could in turn be cut into pieces for better point-contact transistors. Teal’s bosses were skeptical, so he worked in secret on his process at Murray Hill, on borrowed equipment in a borrowed laboratory, from 5 p.m. in the afternoon until 3 a.m.35 Eventually his methods worked so well that Jack Morton gave Teal his full support. Perhaps more important, the advances in crystal pulling soon allowed Teal and his colleague Morgan Sparks to grow junction transistors for Shockley—the device Shockley had theoretically predicted several years before, beginning with his late-night scribbling in the Chicago hotel on New Year’s Eve. Shockley later acknowledged that the two materials scientists had provided “the essential missing ingredient” that made his idea possible.