Patents for transistor-like devices had been filed This article is part of our special report on theħ5th anniversary of the invention of the transistor.īut building such a device had proved an insurmountable challenge to some of the world’s top physicists for more than two decades.

The field effect was already well known in those days, thanks to diodes and related research on semiconductors. The underlying principle of such a device would be something called the field effect-the ability of electric fields to modulate the electrical conductivity of semiconductor materials. The goal was a three-terminal device made out of semiconductors that would accept a low-current signal into an input terminal and use it to control the flow of a larger current flowing between two other terminals, thereby amplifying the original signal. If a more rugged, reliable, and efficient alternative to the triode could be found, the rewards would be immense. But vacuum tubes were power-hungry and fragile. Not only had the triode made long-distance telephony and movie sound possible, it was driving the entire enterprise of commercial radio, an industry worth more than a billion dollars in 1929. The vacuum-tube triode wasn’t quite 20 years old when physicists began trying to create its successor, and the stakes were huge.

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