Semiconductors are anomalous materials that for many decades did little more than perplex scientists. They didn’t conduct electricity like copper does, but nor did they insulate its current like, well, glass. No one could quite think what to do with them, but eventually they discovered that they worked brilliantly as a kind of switch. The first such switch, or transistor, as it was named, was made a couple of days before Christmas 1947 by Walter Brattain and John Bardeen, two physicists working under William Shockley at Bell Labs in the U.S. When you see it today (there is a replica in the
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