The transistor didn’t come out of the blue. Eight years earlier, on December 29, 1939, Shockley had written in his notebook, “It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible.” And after that first transistor was demonstrated, many years followed in perfecting it. It wasn’t until 1956 that Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics “for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.”
