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The physicists and chemists and mathematicians were not meant to avoid one another, in other words, and the research people were not meant to evade the development people.
between the two, and all but assuring a chance encounter or two with a colleague during the commute.
Traveling its length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions, and ideas would be almost impossible.
Walking down that impossibly long tiled corridor, a scientist on his way to lunch in the Murray Hill cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.
Meanwhile the location, and not just the building, had drawn the interest of other companies, leading a number of industrial labs to locate nearby. One newspaper dubbed the New Jersey suburbs “research row.”
Essentially Kelly was creating interdisciplinary groups—combining chemists, physicists, metallurgists, and engineers; combining theoreticians with experimentalists—to work on new electronic technologies.
On June 21, 1945, Kelly had signed off on Case 38139.
The notebook Brattain had used to chart his semiconductor experiments before the war—notebook number 18194—had its last entry in West Street on November 7, 1941. Four years later, in the new Murray Hill building, Brattain picked it up again and opened to page 40. “The war is over,” he wrote.8
IN LATER YEARS, it would become a kind of received wisdom that many of the revolutionary technologies that arose at Bell Labs in the 1940s and 1950s owed their existence to dashing physicists such as Bill Shockley, and to the iconoclastic ideas of quantum mechanics.
More fundamentally, however, the coming age of technologies owed its existence to a quiet revolution in materials.
Shockley would have spent his career trapped in a prison of elegant theory.
Atoms have a nucleus packed full of protons and neutrons that are surrounded by bands of vibrating electrons. In a good conductor—copper, for instance—the band farthest from the nucleus has only one or two electrons, which means this band is mostly empty. The outermost electrons are often free to bounce around and move to neighboring copper atoms.
the band farthest from the nucleus has seven or eight electrons, which means it is mostly full. The electrons are therefore held in fixed positions. These contrasts translate into differences in how the materials conduct electric current, which might be thought of as a “flow” of electrons through a solid material. In a conductor, electrons move freely. In an insulator, they don’t. As the Bell Labs researchers would describe it, the electrons in an insulator essentially “act as a rigid cement” to bind together the atoms in the solid.
In their outer band, atoms that comprise these substances have somewhere between three and five electrons, and they seem to exhibit qualities that are different from those of either a conductor or an insulator. Early in the twentieth century, physicists noted that these materials became better electrical conductors as their temperature increased—the opposite of what happened with metals (and good conductors) like copper. In addition, they could in some circumstances produce an electric current when placed under a light—what was known as a photovoltaic effect. Perhaps most compelling, the
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Silicon crystals would process the incoming radio signal, transforming a weak AC signal into DC, so it could be heard through a headphone.
During a phone call, the two men decided to call one type of silicon p-type (for positive conduction) and the other n-type (for negative).
Atoms within semiconductors bond easily with a number of other elements. Scaff and his colleagues knew that when they cut n-type silicon (atomic number 14) into smaller pieces on a power saw, for instance, they could smell something they were sure was phosphorus (atomic number 15).
Later, the men also determined that p-type silicon often had faint traces of the elements aluminum (13) or boron (5).
Ultimately the metallurgists Scaff and Ohl agreed that certain elements added to the silicon (such as phosphorus) would add excess electrons to its outer band of electrons; those extra electrons could, in turn, move around and help the silicon conduct current, just as they might in a conductor such as copper. This was n-type silicon. On the other hand, certain other elements added to the silicon (such as boron) created additional empty spaces for electrons in the outer band—these became known as holes. These so-called holes, much like electrons, could also move about and conduct current, like
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Just as in crystal wireless sets, the silicon diodes, as they were known, could perform a vital function in radar receivers for their ability to process (that is, rectify) incoming radar signals.
virtue. “A research man,” he later remarked, “is endlessly searching to find a use for something that has no use.”
MEN ARE A KIND OF MATERIAL, TOO.
There isn’t an S.O.B. in the group, he thought to himself, pleased with the prospect of joining in. Then after a minute he had a second thought: Maybe I’m the S.O.B. in the group.
in the subatomic world of solids the behavior of surfaces and interiors was not necessarily the same.
He barely spoke. And when he did speak it was often in something best described as a mumble-whisper.
Shockley enjoyed finding a hanging thread so he could unravel a problem with a swift, magical pull and then move on to something else. Bardeen was content to yank away steadfastly, tirelessly, pulling on various corners of a problem until the whole thing ripped open.
Officially, Shockley’s men were after a basic knowledge of their new materials; only in the back of their minds did a few believe they would soon find something useful for the Bell System.
Summit. Brattain would come to Murray Hill by carpool from nearby Morristown.
Thus the practice was for a supervisor to move any big news up a step—a week or two at a time, in Brattain’s recollection—only after he was convinced of its importance.
As with all important entries in the scientists’ notebooks, Brattain’s entry ended with a signature and verification by third parties: Read & understood by G. L. Pearson Dec. 24, 1947 and H. R. Moore Dec. 24, 1947.
At Murray Hill a large arcade connected the two main buildings. Bown would often hold court in that arcade, and people would come by to chat with him.
Any Bell scientist knew about the spooky and coincidental nature of important inventions. The origins of their entire company—Alexander Bell’s race to the patent office to beat Elisha Gray and become the recognized inventor of the telephone—was the textbook case.
Almost from the start, Labs executives agreed that they should show the device to the military before any public debut but should try to resist any orders to contain the device as a military secret.
For one thing, AT&T maintained its monopoly at the government’s pleasure, and with the understanding that its scientific work was in the public’s interest.
AT&T could earn licensing fees from the patent. And if Bell Labs could gain a head start of a few months, it could take a lead over the competition and reap further rewards as a host of outside engineers and scientists worked to improve its functionality.
“It has been rewritten at least N times, where N > 6,” Shockley noted.
MTSs were never to seduce the secretaries. They were not to work with their doors closed. They were not to refuse help to a colleague, regardless of his rank or department, when it might be necessary.
“This was the taboo that Shockley transgressed, and was never forgiven.”
solid-state group that Shockley led had been built upon the principles of an open exchange of ideas, and Shockley had apparently ignored those principles. At the same time, it was hard not to be awed—the men were witnessing another breakthrough on the level of Bardeen and Brattain’s earlier work. Did it matter whether it was the product of Shockley’s brilliance and effort, or his cunning and bruised ego?
An irony, at least for that moment, was that Shockley’s phantom invention (the junction transistor) had improved upon another invention (the point-contact transistor) that wasn’t useful in any meaningful sense of the word. Lest anyone forget, the point-contact transistor was a device that had never been manufactured, had never been sold, and was still so secret that perhaps only a few dozen people in the world knew it existed.
It was in many respects a demonstration of the power, and the terror, of new materials; a baseball-sized chunk of purified metal—about eleven pounds of newly discovered plutonium—could level a midsized city.
The analogy most often used was that the transistor was like a faucet.
The New York Times, in a famous lapse of editorial judgment, relegated a report on the West Street demonstration to a four-paragraph mention on page 46, in a column called “The News of Radio.”
Any apathy on the public’s part was balanced by enthusiasm within the electronics industry, whose executives were given a special presentation soon after the public announcement.
Moreover, the announcement had piqued the interest of the academy, leading professors at Harvard, Purdue, Stanford, Cornell, and a half dozen other schools to request a sample of the device for their own laboratories.
For instance, had Brattain and Bardeen made a discovery, or an invention?
A discovery often describes a scientific observation of the natural world—the first observation of Jupiter’s moons, for example, or the isolation of a bacteria that causes a deadly plague. Also, a discovery could represent a huge scientific achievement but an economic dead end.
With this antenna, he observed a steady hiss emanating from the Milky Way.
On the other hand, it never led to any kind of profitable telecommunications invention or device.
An invention, by contrast, usually refers to a work of engineering that may use a new scientific discovery—or, as is sometimes the case, long-existing ones—in novel ways.
