How Europe Missed The Transistor


14 min read
photo of Herbert Mataré
Photo: Gusto Images

photo of Herbert Matar\u00e9 Invention and Inventors: In Paris, shortly after World War II, two German scientists, Herbert Mataré (above) and Heinrich Welker, invented the “tran- sistron,” a solid-state amplifier remark- ably similar to the transistor developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories at about the same time. In this X-ray image of a commercial transistron built in the early 1950s, two closely spaced metal point contacts, one from each end, touch the surface of a germanium sliver. A third electrode contacts the other side of the sliver. Mataré is now retired and living in Malibu, Calif. Photo: Gusto Images



So in May 1949, Bell Labs researcher Alan Holden made a sortie to Paris while visiting England, to snoop around the city and see the purported invention for himself. “This business of the French transistors would be hard to unravel, i.e., whether they developed them independently,” he confided in a 14 May letter to William B. Shockley, leader of the Bell Labs solid-state physics group. “As we arrived, they were transmitting to a little portable radio receiver outdoors from a transmitter indoors, which they said was modulated by a transistor.”

Four days later, France’s Secretary of Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones (PTT), the ministry funding Mataré and Welker’s research, announced the invention of the transistron to the French press, lauding the pair’s achievement as a “brilliante réalisation de la recherche française.” Only four years after World War II had ended in Europe, a shining technological phoenix had miraculously risen from the still-smoldering ashes of the devastation.

“This PTT bunch in Paris seems very good to me,” Holden candidly admitted in his letter. “They have little groups in all sorts of rat holes, farm houses, cheese factories, and jails in the Paris suburbs. They are all young and eager.” And one of these small, aggressive research groups, holed up in a converted house in the nearby village of Aulnay-sous-Bois, had apparently come through spectacularly with what might well be the invention of the century—a semiconducting device that would spawn a massive new global industry of incalculable value. Or had it?


Mataré [see photo in “Transistor Twin”], who shared his remembrances from his home in Malibu, Calif., joined the German research effort in September 1939, just as Hitler’s mighty army rumbled across Poland. Having received the equivalent of a master’s degree in applied physics from Aachen Technical University, he began doing radar research at Telefunken AG’s labs in Berlin. There he developed techniques to suppress noise in superheterodyne mixers, which convert the high-frequency radar signals rebounding from radar targets into lower-frequency signals that can be manipulated more easily in electronic circuits. Based on this research, published in 1942, Mataré earned his doctorate from the Technical University of Berlin.

At the time, German radar systems operated at wavelengths as short as half a meter. But the systems could not work at shorter wavelengths, which would have been better able to discern smaller targets, like enemy aircraft. The problem was that the vacuum-tube diodes that rectified current in the early radar receivers could not function at the high frequencies involved. Their dimensions—especially the gap between the diode’s anode and cathode—were too large to cope with ultrashort, high-frequency waves. As a possible substitute, Mataré began experimenting on his own with solid-state crystal rectifiers similar to the “cat’s-whisker” detectors he had tinkered with as a teenager.




As the war ground on, the leaders of the Berlin-based German radar establishment urged the Luftwaffe to pursue research on systems operating at wavelengths well below 50 centimeters—in what we now call the microwave range. They argued that such systems would be small enough to mount in warplanes and detect approaching enemy aircraft through dense clouds and fog.

But German military leaders, basking smugly in their early victories, ignored those pleas. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring, who had served as an open-cockpit fighter pilot in World War I, adamantly believed that the intrinsic fighting abilities of his Aryan warriors made electronic systems superfluous. “My pilots,” he bragged, “do not need a cinema on board!”


Mataré recalled the sudden urgency in an interview. He intensified his previous R&D efforts on crystal rectifiers, particularly those made of silicon, which seemed best suited for microwave reception. But the Allied bombing of Berlin was making life exceedingly difficult for Telefunken researchers. “I spent many hours in subway stations during bomb attacks,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir. So in January 1944, the company shifted much of its radar research to Breslau in Silesia (now Wroclaw, Poland). Mataré worked in an old convent in nearby Leubus.

Laboring full-time to get silicon rectifiers into production, Mataré had scant opportunity to work on reducing the oscillator noise in radar receivers—an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation. But he did manage to build and study an intriguing new device, the crystal “duodiode,” in which two closely spaced metal points contact the semiconductor surface, forming two adjacent crystal rectifiers. If they possess the same resistance and capacitance, these two rectifiers can be used in a special circuit to cancel out noise from the oscillator of a superheterodyne mixer. The noise through one rectifier adds to the overall signal transmitted by the mixer, and the noise through the other rectifier subtracts from that signal. But to ensure identical electrical characteristics, the points must be extremely close—far less than a millimeter apart—so that both contact the same tiny crystal grain on the surface of the semiconductor.

Mataré worked with silicon samples provided by physicist Karl Seiler in Breslau and germanium samples from a Luftwaffe research team near Munich that included Welker, his future co-worker. Although silicon worked better for radar receivers because it rectified at higher frequencies, germanium duodiodes exhibited intriguing behavior. When the two points touched the surface less than 100 micrometers apart, Mataré claims, he occasionally noticed that by varying the voltage on one he could influence the current through the other—a phenomenon he dubbed “interference.” It seemed as if one of his points could affect a region extending far beyond the narrow barrier layer predicted by Schottky’s theory.







But tests he performed in March 1945 revealed no such amplification. In his logbook he recorded “only small effects,” orders of magnitude less than what was predicted by Schottky’s theory. Shockley, Brattain, and their Bell Labs colleagues attempted similar tests that very same spring, with similarly disappointing results.

The failures soon led Bardeen to postulate a novel idea of “surface states”—that free electrons were somehow huddling on the semiconductor surface, shielding out the field. This conjecture, and Brattain’s follow-up experiments to determine the physical nature of the surface states, led to their invention of the point-contact transistor in December 1947—a month after they discovered how to overcome the shielding.




On the top floor the men kept offices and rooms where they often stayed overnight—especially during that frantic first year. Mataré wistfully remembers awakening now and then to the soft trills of Welker playing his violin in the adjoining room.



About that time, Welker put aside his theoretical work and tried to analyze what was going on just beneath the shiny germanium surface of Mataré’s odd contraption. In an undated, handwritten document, now in the archives of Munich’s Deutsches Museum, Welker speculated that one point—which he called the “électrode de commande,” or “control electrode”—was inducing strong electric fields in the germanium just beneath the other electrode, altering the material’s conductivity there.


Mataré argued instead that the control electrode must be injecting positive charges, called holes, into the germanium. And perhaps by trickling along the boundary between two crystal grains, he guessed, they reached the other electrode—many micrometers distant. There they would bolster the conductivity under this electrode and enhance the current through it. “Welker didn’t really understand my measurements,” Mataré says. “At the time he was too busy studying superconductivity.”


Mataré soon learned Bardeen and Brattain’s explanation of the curious effects he had been observing. Electrons trapped on the germanium surface induce a shallow, positively charged layer just beneath it. Holes emitted by the control electrode (which they had dubbed the “emitter”) travel easily within this layer over to the output electrode (or “collector”), markedly boosting the conductivity beneath it and therefore the current flowing through it.


On 13 August, the company submitted a patent application for a “Nouveau système cristallin à plusieurs électrodes réalisant des effets de [sic] relais électroniques” to the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. Its brief description of what might be happening inside the germanium mostly followed Welker’s field-effect interpretation but was probably influenced by Bardeen and Brattain’s explanations.

By the May 1949 press conference, the two Germans had the device [see X-ray image in “Invention and Inventors”] in limited production and were beginning to ship units for use by the PTT as amplifiers in the telephone system—initially in the line between Paris and Limoges. Speaking to the Paris press, Thomas compared these devices with vacuum tubes and demonstrated their use in radio receivers. Reporters hailed the two physicists as “les pères du transistron” (the fathers of the transistron). The French device “turns be superior to its American counterpart,” read a more measured but still favorable account in Toute la Radio, a technical journal [see drawing and photo]. “The latter has a limited lifetime and appears to be fairly unstable, whereas the existing transistrons do not show any sign of fatigue.”

According to Mataré, this superiority could be attributed to the care they employed in fabricating their devices. While observing the process with microscopes, the women working on the small assembly line would measure current-voltage curves for both metal points with oscilloscopes and fix the points rigidly on the germanium with drops of epoxy after the curves matched the desired characteristics. When Brattain and Shockley visited the Paris group in 1950, Mataré showed them telephone amplifiers made with his transistrons—which allowed him to place a call all the way to Algiers. “That’s quite something,” admitted Shockley a bit guardedly, Mataré recalls half a century later.




The summit of Intermetall’s achievements came at the 1953 Düsseldorf Radio Fair. There a young, dark-haired woman demonstrated what was probably the world's first transistor radio, built around four Intermetall point-contact transistors [see photo, “Tuning In”] more than a year before Texas Instruments Inc., in Dallas, publicly claimed that milestone for itself.




But the Bell Labs team had clear priority—and a superior physical understanding of how the electrons and holes were flowing inside germanium. That advantage proved critical to subsequent achievements, such as Shockley’s junction transistor [see “The Lost History of the Transistor,” IEEE Spectrum, May 2004], which was much easier to mass-produce with high reliability and uniformity. By the mid-1950s, nobody was trying to make point-contact transistors any longer, and the industry was moving on to silicon.

A factor crucial to success in the nascent semiconductor industry was the sustained innovation that flourished at Bell Labs—as well as at Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor—leading to silicon transistors and integrated circuits. And that required extensive infrastructure, both material and intellectual, to keep these companies at the frontiers of this fast-moving field. Such an infrastructure already existed in the United States after World War II because of its wartime radar efforts. But France had no comparable infrastructure and had to import talent from occupied Germany, which could not exploit its own radar expertise until the 1950s.

In the absence of any such advantages, it was inevitable that Europe’s fledgling transistor would soon be eclipsed by other, better semiconductor devices and eventually fade from memory.

About the Author


To Probe Further

For more details on the invention of the transistron, see “The ‘French’ Transistor,” by Armand Van Dormael, in Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Conference on the History of Electronics, Bletchley Park, England, June 2004. It is available on the Web at

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