Russell Ohl

Two Bell Labs employees, Russell Ohl and George Southworth, were trying in the late 1930s to detect ultrahigh-frequency radio waves with vacuum tubes, and like Skinner on the other side of the Atlantic, had no success. So, Southworth, a radio ham since childhood, remembered his early silicon-and-cat s-whisker deviees and managed to retrieve some old ones from a seeondhand radio store. Just as they did... 

Russel Ohl of Bell Laboratories discovered and filed patents in 1941 that were granted in 1946 and 1948 " for the p-n junction photovoltaic effect in silicon. The early devices contained rectifying junctions that were accidentally formed by segregation of dopant impurities during cooling. 

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