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On December 16, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter
Brattain, physicists at Bell Laboratories, jabbed two electrodes
into a sliver of germanium half an inch long. The electrical
power coming out of that piece of germanium was 100 times
stronger than what went in. In that moment the transistor
was invented and the information age began.
It is hard to imagine any device more crucial
to modern life that the microchip and the transistor from
which it sprang. Every waking hour people of the world take
their vast benefits for granted -- in cellular phones, ATMs,
wrist watches, calculators, computers, automobiles, radios,
televisions, fax machines, copiers, stoplights, and thousands
of other electronic devices. Without a doubt, the transistor
is the most important artifact of the twentieth century
and the "nerve cell" of our electronic age.
Crystal Fire recounts the story of
the transistor team at Bell Labs headed up by William Shockley
who shared the Nobel Prize with Bardeen and Brattain. While
his colleagues went on to other research, Shockley grew
increasingly obsessed with the new gadget. Eventually he
formed his own firm -- the first semiconductor company in
what would become Silicon Valley, spawning hundreds of other
businesses and a multi-billion-dollar industry.
Above all, Crystal Fire is a tale
of the human factors in technology -- the pride and jealousies
coupled with scientific and economic aspiration that led
to the creation of modern microelectronics and ignited the
greatest technological explosion in history.
Michael Riordan holds two degrees in
physics from MIT and has written several general books on
science and technology, including The Hunting of the
Quark, which won the 1988 American Institute of Physics
Science Writing Award, and coauthored the best-selling Solar
Home Book. He holds a joint appointment in physics at
Stanford University and the University of California at
Santa Cruz.
Lillian Hoddeson is among the world's
leading historians of solid state physics. Her decade as
head of the International Project on the History of Solid
State Physics and The Los Alamos History Project resulted
in the books Out of the Crystal
Maze: Chapters from the History of Solid State Physics
and Critical Assembly: A History
of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years.
She teaches history of science and technology at the University
of Illinois.
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