Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: When were transistors first invented?
The first patent for the field-effect transistor principle was filed in Canada by Austrian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld on October 22, 1925, but Lilienfeld published no research articles about his devices, and his work was ignored by industry. In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another field-effect transistor. There is no direct evidence that these devices were built, but later work in the 1990s show that one of Lilienfeld's designs worked as described and gave substantial gain. Legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that William Shockley and a co-worker at Bell Labs, Gerald Pearson, had built operational versions from Lilienfeld's patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles.
The Bell Labs work on the transistor emerged from war-time efforts to produce extremely pure germanium "crystal" mixer diodes, used in radar units as a frequency mixer element in microwave radar receivers. A parallel project on germanium diodes at Purdue University succeeded in producing the good-quality germanium semiconducting crystals that were used at Bell Labs. Early tube-based circuits did not switch fast enough for this role, leading the Bell team to use solid state diodes instead.
Lee de Forest (August 26, 1873 – June 30, 1961) was an American inventor, self-described "Father of Radio", and a pioneer in the development of sound-on-film recording used for motion pictures. He had over 180 patents, but also a tumultuous career—he boasted that he made, then lost, four fortunes. He was also involved in several major patent lawsuits, spent a substantial part of his income on legal bills, and was even tried (and acquitted) for mail fraud. His most famous invention, in 1906, was the three-element "Audion" (triode) vacuum tube, the first practical amplification device. Although De Forest had only a limited understanding of how it worked, it was the foundation of the field of electronics, making possible radio broadcasting, long distance telephone lines, and talking motion pictures, among countless other applications.
To the extent that cultural contributions comprise invention, innovation, and progress, Springfield has been, historically, one of the nation's most innovative cities. In 1819, inventor Thomas Blanchard invented the lathe in Springfield, which would catalyze manufacturing developments now known the world over as interchangeable parts and the assembly line. In 1825, Blanchard also built the first American car, a "horseless carriage," which was powered by steam. In 1844, inventor Charles Goodyear perfected and patented his process for making vulcanized rubber in Springfield - as of 2011, as it has been for many years previous, Goodyear's name is known the world over for rubber production. In 1868, inventor Margaret E. Knight invented a machine for folding and gluing flat-bottomed paper bags.
In 1857, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph, the first device that could record sound waves as they passed through the air. It was intended only for visual study of the recording and could not play back the sound. The recording medium was a sheet of soot-coated paper wrapped around a rotating cylinder carried on a threaded rod. A stylus, attached to a diaphragm through a series of levers, traced a line through the soot, creating a graphic record of the motions of the diaphragm as it was minutely propelled back and forth by the audio-frequency variations in air pressure.
On July 31, 1790 inventor Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont became the first person to be issued a patent in the United States. His patented invention was an improvement in the "making of Pot Ash by a new apparatus & process." The earliest patent law required that a working model of each invention be produced in miniature.
In addition to the telegraph, Morse invented a marble-cutting machine that could carve three-dimensional sculptures in marble or stone. He could not patent it, however, because of an existing 1820 Thomas Blanchard design.
De Forest's Audion did not see much use until its ability to amplify was recognized around 1912 by several researchers, who used it to build the first successful amplifying radio receivers and electronic oscillators. The many uses for amplification motivated its rapid development. By 1913 improved versions with higher vacuum were developed by Harold Arnold at American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which had purchased the rights to the Audion from De Forest, and Irving Langmuir at General Electric, who named his tube the "Pliotron", These were the first vacuum tube triodes. The name "triode" appeared later, when it became necessary to distinguish it from other kinds of vacuum tubes with more or fewer elements (e.g. diodes, tetrodes, pentodes, etc.). There were lengthy lawsuits between De Forest and von Lieben, and De Forest and the Marconi Company, who represented John Ambrose Fleming, the inventor of the diode.
Once in the U.S., Zworykin found work at the Westinghouse laboratories in Pittsburgh, where he eventually had an opportunity to engage in television experiments. He came up with the main invention of the 20th century – electronic television. He applied for a television patent in the US in 1923. He summarized the resulting invention in two patent applications. The first, entitled "Television Systems", was filed on December 29, 1923, and was followed by a second application in 1925 of essentially the same content, but with minor changes and the addition of a Paget-type screen for color transmission and reception. He was awarded a patent for the 1925 application in 1928, and two patents for the 1923 application that was divided in 1931, although the equipment described was never successfully demonstrated.
Before the devices existed that are now referred to as mobile phones or cell phones, there were some precursors. In 1908, a Professor Albert Jahnke and the Oakland Transcontinental Aerial Telephone and Power Company claimed to have developed a wireless telephone. They were accused of fraud and the charge was then dropped, but they do not seem to have proceeded with production. Beginning in 1918, the German railroad system tested wireless telephony on military trains between Berlin and Zossen. In 1924, public trials started with telephone connection on trains between Berlin and Hamburg. In 1925, the company was founded to supply train telephony equipment and, in 1926, telephone service in trains of the Deutsche Reichsbahn and the German mail service on the route between Hamburg and Berlin was approved and offered to first-class travelers.
In 1789, Franz Aepinus developed a device with the properties of a "condenser" (now known as a capacitor.) The Aepinus condenser was the first capacitor developed after the Leyden jar, and was used to demonstrate conduction and induction. The device was constructed so that the space between two plates could be adjusted, and the glass dielectric separating the two plates could be removed or replaced with other materials.
Warren S. Johnson (1847–1911) of Wisconsin patented a bi-metal room thermostat in 1883, and two years later filed a patent for the first multi-zone thermostatic control system.
Albert Butz (1849–1905) invented the electric thermostat and patented it in 1886.
The first carburetor was invented by Samuel Morey in 1826. The first person to patent a carburetor for use in a petroleum engine was Siegfried Marcus with his 6 July 1872 patent for a device which mixes fuel with air.
The invention of the television was the work of many individuals in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Individuals and corporations competed in various parts of the world to deliver a device that superseded previous technology. Many were compelled to capitalize on the invention and make profit, while some wanted to change the world through visual and audio communication technology.
The development of solid electrolyte tantalum capacitors began in the early 1950s as a miniaturized, more reliable low-voltage support capacitor to complement the newly invented transistor. The solution found by R. L. Taylor and H. E. Haring of the Bell Labs was based on experience with ceramics. They ground down tantalum to a powder, pressed this powder into a cylindrical form and then sintered the powder particles into a pellet (“slug”) at high temperatures, between 1500 and 2000 °C, under vacuum conditions. These first sintered tantalum capacitors used a non-solid electrolyte not consistent with the concept of solid state electronics. 1952 a targeted search in the Bell Labs for a solid electrolyte by D. A. McLean and F. S. Power led to the invention of manganese dioxide as a solid electrolyte for a sintered tantalum capacitor.
Nikola Tesla invented a deceptively simple one-way valve for fluids in 1916, called a Tesla valve. It was patented in 1920 (U.S. patent 1,329,559).
A tunnel diode or Esaki diode is a type of semiconductor diode that has negative resistance due to the quantum mechanical effect called tunneling. It was invented in August 1957 by Leo Esaki, Yuriko Kurose, and Takashi Suzuki when they were working at Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, now known as Sony. In 1973, Esaki received the Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Brian Josephson, for discovering the electron tunneling effect used in these diodes. Robert Noyce independently devised the idea of a tunnel diode while working for William Shockley, but was discouraged from pursuing it. Tunnel diodes were first manufactured by Sony in 1957, followed by General Electric and other companies from about 1960, and are still made in low volume today.
In 1959–1961 years, when Texas Instruments and Westinghouse worked in parallel on aviation "molecular electronics", their competition had a friendly character. The situation changed in 1962 when Texas Instruments started to zealously pursue the real and imaginary infringers of their patents and received the nicknames "The Dallas legal firm" and "semiconductor cowboys". This example was followed by some other companies. Nevertheless, the IC industry continued to develop no matter the patent disputes.During the patent wars of the 1960s the press and professional community in the United States recognized that the number of the IC inventors could be rather large. The book "Golden Age of Entrepreneurship" named four people: Kilby, Lehovec, Noyce and Hoerni. Sorab Ghandhi in "Theory and Practice of Microelectronics" (1968) wrote that the patents of Lehovec and Hoerni were the high point of semiconductor technology of the 1950s and opened the way for the mass production of ICs.
The audio amplifier was invented around 1912 by Lee De Forest, made possible by his invention of the first practical amplifying electrical component, the triode vacuum tube (or "valve" in British English) in 1907. The triode was a three terminal device with a control grid that can modulate the flow of electrons from the filament to the plate. The triode vacuum amplifier was used to make the first AM radio. Early audio power amplifiers were based on vacuum tubes and some of these achieved notably high audio quality (e.g., the Williamson amplifier of 1947-9). Audio power amplifiers based on transistors became practical with the wide availability of inexpensive transistors in the late 1960s. Since the 1970s, most modern audio amplifiers are based on solid state devices (transistors such as BJTs, FETs and MOSFETs). Transistor-based amplifiers are lighter in weight, more reliable and require less maintenance than tube amplifiers. In the 2010s, there are still audio enthusiasts, musicians (particularly electric guitarists, electric bassists, Hammond organ players and Fender Rhodes electric piano players, among others), audio engineers and music producers who prefer tube-based amplifiers, and what is perceived as a "warmer" tube sound.
Key design parameters for audio power amplifiers are frequency response, gain, noise, and distortion. These are interdependent; increasing gain often leads to undesirable increases in noise and distortion. While negative feedback actually reduces the gain, it also reduces distortion. Most audio amplifiers are linear amplifiers operating in class AB.
Three other CPU chip designs were produced at about the same time: the Four-Phase Systems AL1, done in 1969; the MP944, completed in 1970 and used in the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet; and the Texas Instruments TMS-1000 chip, announced in September 17, 1971. Both the AL1 and the MP944 use several chips for the implementation of the CPU function. The TMS0100 chip was presented as a “calculator on a chip” with the original designation TMS1802NC. This chip contains a very primitive CPU and can only be used to implement various simple 4-function calculators. It is the precursor of the TMS1000, introduced in 1974, which is considered the first microcontroller i.e., a computer on a chip containing not only the CPU, but also ROM, RAM, and I/O functions. The MCS-4 family of 4 chips developed by Intel, of which the 4004 is the CPU or microprocessor, was far more versatile and powerful than the single chip TMS1000, allowing the creation of a variety of small computers for various applications.
Although he was the man responsible for its technology, Farnsworth appeared only once on a television program. On July 3, 1957, he was a mystery guest ("Doctor X") on the CBS quiz show "I've Got A Secret". He fielded questions from the panel as they unsuccessfully tried to guess his secret ("I invented electronic television."). For stumping the panel, he received $80 and a carton of Winston cigarettes. Host Garry Moore then spent a few minutes discussing with Farnsworth his research on such projects as high-definition television, flat-screen receivers, and fusion power. Farnsworth said, "There had been attempts to devise a television system using mechanical disks and rotating mirrors and vibrating mirrors—all mechanical. My contribution was to take out the moving parts and make the thing entirely electronic, and that was the concept that I had when I was just a freshman in high school in the Spring of 1921 at age 14." When Moore asked about others' contributions, Farnsworth agreed, "There are literally thousands of inventions important to television. I hold something in excess of 165 American patents." The host then asked about his current research, and the inventor replied, "In television, we're attempting first to make better utilization of the bandwidth, because we think we can eventually get in excess of 2,000 lines instead of 525 ... and do it on an even narrower channel ... which will make for a much sharper picture. We believe in the picture-frame type of a picture, where the visual display will be just a screen. And we hope for a memory, so that the picture will be just as though it's pasted on there."
Texas Instruments invented the thermal print head in 1965, and the Silent 700, a computer terminal with a thermal printer, was released in the market in 1969. The Silent 700 was the first thermal print system that printed on thermal paper. During the 1970s, Hewlett-Packard integrated thermal paper printers into the design of its HP9800 series desktop computers, and integrated it into the top of the 2600-series CRT terminals as well as in plotters.
In electronics, a transistor is a semiconductor device commonly used to amplify or switch electronic signals. Because the controlled output power can be much larger than the controlling input power, the transistor provides amplification of a signal. The transistor is the fundamental building block of all modern electronic devices, and is used in radio, telephone, computer, and other electronic systems. From November 17, 1947 to December 23, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at AT&T Bell Labs, underwent experimentations and finally observed that when two gold point contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, a signal was produced whereby the output power was larger than the input. The manager of the Bell Labs semiconductor research group, William Shockley, saw the potential in this and worked over the next few months greatly expanding the knowledge of semiconductors in order to construct the first point-contact transistor. Shockley is considered by many to be the "father" of the transistor. Hence, in recognition of his work, the transistor is widely, yet not universally acknowledged as the most important invention of the entire 20th century since it forms today's building blocks of processors found and used in almost every modern computing and electronics device. In recognition of their invention of the transistor, Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The first bipolar junction transistors were invented by Bell Labs' William Shockley, which applied for patent (2,569,347) on June 26, 1948. On April 12, 1950, Bell Labs chemists Gordon Teal and Morgan Sparks had successfully produced a working bipolar NPN junction amplifying germanium transistor. Bell Labs had announced the discovery of this new "sandwich" transistor in a press release on July 4, 1951.
The development of transistors in 1948 by Bell Laboratories led to major improvements to the hearing aid. The transistor was invented by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. Transistors were created to replace vacuum tubes; they were small, required less battery power and had less distortion and heat than their predecessor. These vacuum tubes were typically hot and fragile, so the transistor was the ideal replacement.The 1952 Sonotone 1010 used a transistor stage along with vacuum tubes, to extend battery life. The size of these transistors led to developments in miniature, carbon microphones. These microphones could be mounted on various items, even eyeglasses. In 1951, Raytheon manufactured the transistor and was one of the first companies to mass-produce transistors to throughout America. Raytheon realized that their hearing aid only lasted short-term and began to sell the vacuum-tube hearing aids again along with transistor hearing aids.
On December 1, 1957, Jean Hoerni first proposed a planar technology of bipolar transistors. In this process, all the p-n junctions were covered by a protective layer, which should significantly improve reliability. However, in 1957, this proposal was considered technically impossible. The formation of the emitter of an n-p-n transistor required diffusion of phosphorus, and the work of Frosch suggested that SiO does not block such diffusion. In March 1959, Chi-Tang Sah, a former colleague of Hoerni, pointed Hoerni and Noyce to an error in the conclusions of Frosch. Frosch used a thin oxide layer, whereas the experiments of 1957–1958 showed that a thick layer of oxide can stop the phosphorus diffusion. Armed with this knowledge, by March 12, 1959 Hoerni made the first prototype of a planar transistor, and on May 1, 1959 filed a patent application for the invention of the planar process. In April 1960, Fairchild launched the planar transistor 2N1613, and by October 1960 completely abandoned the mesa transistor technology. By the mid-1960s, the planar process has become the main technology of producing transistors and monolithic integrated circuits.