Electronics: The Life Story of a Technology

by David L. Morton Jr., Joseph Gabriel

Electronics provides a welcome, comprehensive history of one of the late twentieth century's greatest technologies: electronic devices. Some of them, the laser and the microchip for example, have become household words. Yet their origins and operation are largely unknown to the general public, remaining mysterious outside the field of engineering. Their advent brought about many of the most important historical developments in recent memory―the rise of television, the Cold War, the Space Race, the growth of Asian semiconductor manufacturers, and the emergence of the surveillance society. Electronics also relates the fascinating stories of how scientists and engineers created and commercialized such devices as the transistor, the Magnetron tube used to power microwave ovens, the CRT (cathode ray tube), the laser, the first integrated circuit, the microprocessor, and memory chips.

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Kursad Albayraktaroglu · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book about the history of the building blocks of modern electronics: it has been more than 25 years since I built that first transistor amplifier circuit in an EE laboratory, yet I learned something new in every other page.

Many electrical engineers might have read a book or two on how the transistor was invented, but not many of us under the age of 60 know about the the birth, evolution, and death of vacuum tubes(with apologies to audiophiles who insist that tubes have a "softer" sound, whatever it means) or what a Vidicon tube was. Definitely recommended to anyone interested in learning more about how the field of modern electronics reached this point.