About sixty years ago (December 16, 1947) some folks at Bell Labs perfected a little device called a transistor.

There are lots of websites devoted to this invention, but I thought it was worthy of note in TechSpectives because of it’s primary role in all that this site represents. In fact, not only the content that this site represents but also the technology that underlies this site and the devices you use to access this site.

A few of us who are old enough to remember the pre-transistor days were talking this morning about some of the items that were the early products of this revolution. In the mid - ’50’s “going wireless” meant a device that you could operate without a connection to a power source, a battery powered radio. This was, at the time, every bit as revolutionary as the introduction of the portable MP3 player. I remember how subversive it felt to smuggle a transistor radio into my grade school and listen to the World Series during a history class.

In an early adaptation to the technology, I recall one teacher who actually encouraged us to bring our small radios to study hall to listen to the live reports from Project Mercury flights (If Project Mercury doesn’t sound familiar, look it up on Wikipedia). That sort of took the subversiveness out of having a transistor radio on school grounds. The real killer was that we were supposed to write a report on what we heard. So I guess the idea of turning hip new technology into homework isn’t new either.

The interest in those small radios and other seemingly innocuous devices like small adding machines got the ball rolling. Looking back the path from transistor to integrated circuit, to large scale integration, to very large scale integration, etc. seems obvious, even predictable. What wasn’t predictable were the applications that these little devices would support. The jump from centralized radio broadcasts received by personal devices to a relatively egalitarian world wide web of devices was foreseen by only a couple of extremely visionary souls.

So, Happy Birthday Mr. Transistor. It will be fascinating to see what the future will bring.

Here are some pictures of the history of the transistor.

Vance Williams