Bell Research Laboratories

In 1948 William Bradford Shockley (1910-1989), who is considered the inventor of the transistor, and his associates at Bell Research Laboratories, Walter Houser Brattain (1902-1987) and John Bardeen (1908-1991), discovered that a crystal of germanium could act as a semiconductor of electricity. This unique property of germanium indicated to them that it could be used as both a rectifier and an amplifier to replace the old glass vacuum tubes in radios. Their friend John Robinson Pierce (1910-2002) gave this new solid-state device the name transistor, since the device had to overcome some resistance when a current of electricity passed through it. Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen all shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. 

The role of the Bell Labs metallurgists in the creation of the early transistors was clearly set out in a historical overview by the then director of the Materials Research Laboratory at Bell Labs, Scaflf (1970). 

A number of American research institutions and the people who shaped them have already featured in this book the creation of the Materials Research Laboratories Robert Mehl s influence on the Naval Research Laboratory and on Carnegie Institute of Technology Hollomon s influence on the GE laboratory Seitz s influence on the University of Illinois (and numerous other places) Carothers and Flory at the Dupont laboratory the triumvirate who invented the transistor and the atmosphere at Bell Laboratories that made this feat possible Stookey, glass-ceramics and the Corning Glass laboratory. I would like now to round off this list with an account of a most impressive laboratory that came to grief, and the man who shaped it. 

William Shockley (seated), John Bardeen (standing, left), and Waller H. Braltain doing transistor research at Bell Telephone Laboratories (New York, 194S). (Corbis Corporation)... 

First solar cell developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories researchers. 

Prof. William P. Slichter, Chemical Physics Research Department, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07971, U.S.A. 

Wefers, K. Bell, G. M. "Oxides and Hydroxides of Aluminum" Technical Paper No. 19 Alcoa Research Laboratories East St. Louis, 1972. 

Prof. Dr. G. V. Schulz, Institut fur Physikalische Chemie der Universitat, 6500 Mainz Dr. William P. Slichter, Bell Telephone Laboratories Incorporated, Chemical Physics Research Department, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07971, USA Prof. Dr. A. J. Slaverman, Hugo de Grootstraat 27, Laboratorium voor Anorg. 

In some recent work at the Bell Telephone Research Laboratory, a low pressure of I0 " torr of mercury was used. This is an unusually low pressure, one not easily obtained. Calculate the number of molecules still remaining in 1 ml of gas at this pressure at 27°C. 

Bell, K. and McKenzie, H. A. 1976. The physical and chemical properties of whey proteins. In Milk Protein Workshop, Tanunda, South Australia. Northfield Research Laboratories, South Australian Department of Agriculture. 

Belling N. G., Dyer H. B., 1964, Impact strength determination of diamond abrasive grit, Brochure of Diamond Research Laboratory, Johannesburg. 

Your talk is astonishing to me. I read the financial section, and your business is in meltdown. It is the worst catastrophe in the history of the telephone since Alexander Graham Bell. To hear you talk, Elsa, it s like business as usual in the research laboratory. That s just amazing. Who do you talk to out in the businesses when they re out there firing people ... 

K Wefers, G M Bell, Oxides and Hydroxides of Aluminum Alcoa Research Laboratories Technical Paper No 19, 1972, K Biclcfeldt, G Winkhaus, Chemische Technologic (1Vin-nacker-Kuchler) 4 Aufl 1983 Bd 3 Anorgan Technologic 2, p 2, L K Hudson, C Misra, K Wefers, Ullmann s Encycl Ind Chem 5th ed 1985 Vol A2, p 575... 

Semiconductor surfaces first became of interest about twenty years ago, and came into sharp focus only in the late forties and early fifties when germanium and silicon surfaces were studied intensively by numerous large research and development groups in various countries. This unusually intense activity resulted from the discovery of the transistor by a team of scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1948 but it is of interest to note that this discovery was itself a direct outgrowth of work on semiconductor surfaces by the same scientists. It is also of interest to note that just as work on semiconductor surfaces has contributed to modern solid state electronics, so work on metal surfaces has contributed heavily to vacuum-tube electronics. Outstanding in this case are Langmuir s studies on gas adsorption and vacuum techniques. 

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