原创 ZZ-Who really invented the Transistor?

 2010-3-16 08:41  8591 2 2 分类: 工程师职场

Who really invented the Transistor?

Other claims to the invention...

This article first appeared in Radio Bygones magazine, www.radiobygones.com

Reprinted here by permission from the author, Andrew
Emmerson

Andrew Emmerson uncovers conflicting claims and some
revisionist history.

Before the fall of the Soviet Union the state
educators of the old USSR were kept busy rewriting history, either deleting
from the roll of honour all reference to heroes of the people now fallen from
grace or ascribing the credit for every modern miracle to obscure communist
pioneers.

This time, however, it’s the Americans under fire for falsifying history
and the subject is the invention of the transistor. The received wisdom is that
William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain invented this device in
1947 and of that there can surely be no doubt. But there is and the colourful
claims and counterclaims make some fascinating reading.

One fact is not in dispute, that the achievement of Shockley, Bardeen
and Brattain was responsible for kick-starting the solid-state electronics
revolution and the age of computerised informatics. To decry their role in
transforming electronics would be both churlish and crazy, but the claim that they
pioneered solid-state amplification has no substance at all.

Received version

Before we go back to the dark ages, let’s examine the
standard version of transistor history, courtesy of Andrew Wylie, who has set
up an excellent website devoted to early transistor devices. He states:

The transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories in
December 1947 (not in 1948 as is often stated) by John Bardeen and Walter
Brattain. 'Discovered' would be a better word, for although they were seeking a
solid-state equivalent to the vacuum tube, it was found accidentally during the
investigation of the surface states around a diode point-contact. The first
transistors were therefore of the point-contact type. William Shockley, the
theorist who was leading the research, knew at once that this was not what he
was seeking: at the time he was trying to create a solid-state device similar
to what we now call a junction field-effect transistor.

Bell Labs kept their discovery quiet until June 1948
(hence the confusion about the date of discovery). They then announced it in a
fanfare of publicity, but few people realised its significance, and it did not
even make the front page of the newspapers. Shockley basically ignored the
point-contact transistor, and continued his research in other directions. He
modified his original ideas and developed the theory of the junction
transistor. In July 1951, Bell
announced the creation of such a device. In September 1951 Bell held a transistor symposium, and
licensed their technology for both types of transistor to anyone who paid the
required fee of 25 thousand dollars. This was the start of the transistor
industry that has changed the way that we live, in the Western world at least.

Alien efforts

However, an entirely different origin has been
proposed by Jack Shulman, president of the American Computer Company. Frankly,
his theory is pretty fantastic but it makes a rattling good read if nothing
else. Here's what he says...

I grew up in the household of the head of Bell Labs,
so I knew that there was something strange about the transistor because I knew
Bill Shockley, and Bill Shockley was something of a witless buffoon. There's no
way he could have invented the transistor.

The symbol for the transistor is made up of three
pieces: positive, positive and negative; or negative, negative and
positive...silicon dioxide doped with arsenic and boron, in 1947. Now, in 1947,
doping things with boron was not easy. It required the sort of equipment that
even Bell Labs in 1946 did not possess. They had this type of equipment at
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, but it would have taken thousands and thousands
and thousands of man-hours to invent the transistor.

If you look back at it historically, what AT&T was
claiming was that one day this "genius", William Shockley, was
working with a rectifier; he looked at it and he noticed it had unusual
propensities, and there, bingo, he invented the transistor! He figured it out
right there!

Anybody believe that story? Me neither. And I knew,
because the administrative head of the transistor project was Jack Morton—the
man at whose house I was staying to go to school and whose sons I was friends
with. He often commented on the fact that it was really a shame that those
three idiots got responsibility for the transistor and he didn't.

Mr Shulman goes on to claim that the transistor's real
origin lies in technology recovered by the US Air Force from an alien
spacecraft recovered at Roswell,
New Mexico in 1947. It's
extremely controversial stuff and contrary to all received wisdom—but quite
amusing of you don't take it too seriously. Let’s move on rapidly, back down to
earth and to minerals in particular.

Start of silicon

It was in 1906 that the G.W. Pickard of Amesbury, Massachusetts
perfected the crystal detector and in November of that year took out a patent
for the use of silicon in detectors. Arguably this was the start of the silicon
revolution and it did not take long before experimenters achieved amplification
using crystal devices, long before the term transistor was devised.

Solid-state electronics were born even earlier, when Ferdinand Braun
invented a solid-state rectifier using a point contact based on lead sulphide
in 1874. But it’s to Pickard that the credit goes for discovering that the
point contact between a fine metallic wire (the so-called ‘cat’s whisker’) and
the surface of certain crystalline materials (notably silicon) could rectify
and demodulate high-frequency alternating currents, such as those produced by
radio waves in a receiving antenna (what Pickard called a
‘wave-interceptor’). His crystal detector (point-contact rectifier) was
the basis of countless crystal set radio receivers, a form of radio receiver
that was popular until the crystal detector was superseded by the thermionic
triode valve.

By its nature the crystal rectifier was a passive
device, with no signal gain. But radio historian Lawrence A. Pizzella WR6K
notes anecdotal stories of shipboard wireless operators in the second decade of
the 20^th century achieving amplification using a silicon carbide
(carborundum) crystal and two cat’s whiskers. He cites a taped interview made
in 1975 with Russell Ohl at his home in Vista,
California in which claims of
signal gain were made. This is an excerpt from Ohl’s testimony:

He gave me a copy that he had of… I think it was The
Electrician. It was a British magazine, one of these big-paged things, you
know. In it was a translation from a Russian paper in which they had used
carborundum with two contacts and a battery supplying one of the contacts and
had gotten a power gain of ten times. And this was way back in the 1910s, so
the fact that you could get a power gain had been known, but it was never put
on a controlled basis. I knew about it because an operator of the Signal Corps
back in 1919 had told me that some of the operators used carborundum as
oscillators for receiving. When I had seen this article that Curtis gave me, I
was not astounded because I had known about this before I ever saw the article.
I had heard about it. I knew a former first sergeant in the Signal Corps who
had lived in, the boarding house that I lived and he was an expert radio
operator. He told me a great deal about the use of crystal detectors on ships.
He told me that professional operators carried two crystal detectors with them.
One of them was made of carborundum them and one of them was something like
galena or something of that sort. He said the carborundum was used for two
purposes. They used it in the harbour when they were close to a transmitter to
prevent burnout. They also used it at long distances with two points. One point
was excited with a battery and they were able to get long wave oscillations out
of it and in that we were able to be in long wave telegraph stations.

Ohl, it should be noted, was the man who invented the silicon solar cell
in 1941 and discovered during World War II that semiconductors could be doped
with small amounts of impurities to create useful new properties. Born in 1889, he was bitten by the radio bug at the age of 16
and devoted much of his life to making simple radio receivers employing
semiconductors. His accidental discovery of the P-N barrier in his work at Bell
Telephone Laboratories led to the development of solar cells.

Oscillating crystals

A fascinating letter to Wireless World in May 1981 under this
title came from Dr Harry E. Stockman of Sercolab (Arlington, Mass.)
Then 76 years old, he had lived through the era under discussion and provided a
valuable summary of ‘prior art’ preceding the re-invention of the transistor. His
letter had been triggered by a ‘Sixty Years Ago’ item in the same periodical) recalling an article by
W. T. Ditcham on crystal oscillation in its May 1920 issue.

This effect, he stated, was discovered by Dr W. H. Eccles in 1910, and
remarked: “It is hard to realize that it took about ten years for practical
active crystal-diode circuits to appear, in spite of Ditcham's
reminder—circuits that included both RF and AF amplification. The last one, at
the time, was totally unknown to most ‘affectionados’, one of them being the
author of this letter. Most of the credit for creating practical
devices [of this kind] goes to O. V. Lossev of Russia, whether or not he knew of
Eccles' pioneer work a decade earlier. He should have known about it; one has
the right to expect that he as a qualified scientist was familiar with the
world's scientific literature.”

Clarification comes from Lawrence Pizzella, who
explains how these experimenters created successful amplification techniques
using mineral crystal devices. Lossev, he says, used zincite and a steel cat’s
whisker with bias to make an oscillator and even a low-power transmitter in the
early 1920s. This was reported in considerable detail in the September 1924
issue of Radio News and in the 1^st and 8^th October
1924 issues of Wireless World. Hugo Gernsback, the editor of Radio
News, named this the ‘Crystodyne’ and predicted that crystals would someday
replace valves in electronics. All details needed to duplicate these circuits
to make a tunnel diode oscillator are in these articles. A German book by Eugen
Nesper described an oscillating detector circuit in 1925 too, using
zincite material and a bias voltage of 8 to 14 volts.

With
so much information in print it’s inconceivable that the Bell Labs team were unaware
of these techniques. But in any case Pizzella says Russell Ohl showed William Shockley his radio using
crystal amplifiers several years before the transistor’s alleged invention in
1947. Shockley is also quoted (in Crystal Fire by Riordan and Hoddeson)
as saying that seeing Ohl’s radio convinced him that an amplifying crystal
could be made.

First FET

Another experimenter of this era who deserves far greater credit is Dr
Julius Lilienfeld of Germany,
who in 1926 patented the concept of a field effect transistor (FET). He
believed that applying a voltage to a poorly conducting material would change
its conductivity and thereby achieve amplification. Lilienfeld is rightly noted
for his work on the electrolytic capacitor fame but according to Stockman should
be recognised also for his pioneering work on semiconductors.

Says Stockman, himself a distinguished author of many
books and papers on semiconductor physics, “He created his non-tube device
around 1923, with one foot in Canada
and the other in the USA,
and the date of his Canadian patent application was October 1925. Later
American patents followed, which should have been well known to the Bell Labs
patent office. Lilienfeld demonstrated his remarkable tubeless radio receiver
on many occasions, but God help a fellow who at that time threatened the reign
of the tube.”

David Topham GM3WKB adds that Lilienfeld followed his
1925 (Canadian) and 1926 (American) patent applications for a ‘Method and
Apparatus for controlling Electric Currents’ with another granted in 1933. Says
David: “US
patent 1,900,018 clearly describes the field effect transistor, constructing it
using thin film deposition techniques and using dimensions that became normal
when the metal oxide FET was indeed manufactured in quantity well over 30 years
later. The patent (and subsequent ones) describes the advantages of the device
over ‘cumbersome vacuum tubes’.”

More prior art

The website of Dr Robert G. Adams states that he designed a crystal
amplifier at the age of thirteen years, when he lived at Hastings, New Zealand.
A photograph of his set-up is shown on his website along with the diagram
reproduced here with acknowledgment.

Connections to the two crystals made use of the then-available vertical
cantilever type cat’s whisker holders, providing stable connections to the
central junction and input and output points. Two different methods of
interconnection between the two crystals gave no apparent difference in
performance. Adams stresses that it never
occurred to him to pursue any patent action simply because the invention was
already in the public domain. In his view it was obviously unpatentable by
anybody (Bell Labs notwithstanding).

Someone who built a similar amplifier of this kind is Canadian radio
amateur Larry Kayser (va3lk / wa3zia),
who spotted a circuit for a ‘novel’ crystal radio circuit that exhibited
‘amplification’ published in Gernsback’s magazine Radio during the
1932-1934 period. This, he recalls, used two cat’s whisker probes on a
lead-mounted galena (PbS) detector. He says he was able to duplicate this
action in the early 1950s as a young hobbyist and whilst the degree of
amplification was nothing like that of the first commercial transistors, it was
at least in the order of 3dB or a bit more.

History repeated

That was then but this is now. American radio amateur Nyle Steiner K7NS
was determined to prove or disprove these claims for himself—and has succeeded
in spectacular fashion. On his website he posts technical results, photographs
and curve traces of several experiments in which he has demonstrably achieved
oscillation with iron pyrites and even transmitted his voice over the air (a
circuit for a broadcast band iron pyrites negative resistance oscillator is
given there).

“Success with this experiment has been a very exciting
experience for me as it represents the ability to build a simple homemade
active semiconductor device. It is almost like making your own homemade
transistor,” he states. “This is an actual realisation of some very old, and
esoteric 1920s experiments by Eccles, Pickard and Lossev, that were so vaguely
reported in a few articles that I have often wondered if in fact it had
actually been done. Even so, I have always had an extreme fascination with
those reports of being able to produce a continuous wave RF signal from a crude
semiconductor material back in the very early days of radio.”

Other experiments of his show an oscillator based on zinc ferrite and an
N-type negative resistance device, similar to a tunnel diode, created by
touching a piece of galvanized steel wire against a piece of aluminium. As Nyle
says, “This project may not be very practical but I find it to be a very
exciting experience.

Historic conclusion

The more you study the history of invention, the fewer example you find
of entirely new devices conceived and perfected by one individual in isolation.
History loves heroes and people prefer simple stories, regardless of
inconvenient facts.

It’s perfectly clear that Bell Labs didn’t invent the transistor, they
re-invented it. The fact that they totally failed to acknowledged the pioneer
work done by others can be explained by human nature—pride, arrogance,
ignorance or plain self-interest. It’s perfectly true that the world wasn’t
ready for previous incarnations of the transistor but that was no reason for
denying that Lilienfeld patented the original solid-state triode
oscillator/amplifier well before others claimed all the credit. But that’s
life; it was not the first time and doubtless not the last.

Further reading

Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal
Fire (1998)
William Brinkman, Douglas Haggan and William Troutman, A History
of the Invention of the Transistor and Where It Will Lead Us, IEEE
Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. 32, no. 12, December 1997 (and on
the WWW at www.sscs.org/AdCom/transistorhistory.pdf)
Julius Nesper, Wie baue ich einen einfachen Detektorempf?nger?
(1925)