http://www.beatriceco.com/bti/porticus/bell/belllabs_transistor1.html
I dunno…. Roswell? Really? But I find myself attracted to anything that involves the use of iron pyrite and cats’ whiskers in radio. Mike, KL7R, sent me a bunch of fools gold from Alaska and it turned out to be better than galena as a detector.
Our book: “SolderSmoke — Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics” http://soldersmoke.com/book.htm Our coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmoke Our Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20
Wikipedia has a well-written history which covers some of the pre-Bell work. John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain deserve to be known as the inventors since they actually understood the physics of what they were doing, and they published detailed papers. Engineers could build on that and the transistor was born. Likewise, in my view Lee deForest discovered the triode, but he didn’t invent it since he didn’t understand how it worked. Armstrong did that, he published, and real electronics was born. 73 de KC7IT
Oops. here’s the Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor#Invention_of_the_transistor
But don’t get me wrong..I think it’s great to fool around with crystals like this. Who’s going to build a radio with every component, transistor(s), resistors, capacitors, inductors and even the battery homebrewed?
The FET seems to have been invented abou t 1 925-30 by JE Lilienfeld. See US Patent 1745175 issued 28 January 1930 and Analog for March 1965. John Rabson F5VLF