In the 1920s, a professor named Benjamin Brown, at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, had changed Brattain’s life by introducing him to advanced physics. Brattain wanted to do the same thing for someone else. “I’ve gotten to the place where I will retire to my small alma mater out there and do a little teaching,” he told the sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, who interviewed him at Murray Hill in the early 1960s.
