The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World

by Charles C. Mann

The two researchers, Calvin Fuller and Gerald Pearson, were members of the team that transformed the transistor, invented at Bell in 1947, from a finicky laboratory prototype into the mass-produced foundation of the computer industry. At the center of this work was silicon, common and inexpensive, a principal constituent of beach sand. Silicon forms crystals, each atom linked to four neighbors in a pattern identical to that formed by carbon atoms in diamonds. As students learn in high school chemistry, the atoms bond to each other by sharing their outer electrons. Silicon crystals can be adulterated—“doped,” in the jargon—by replacing a few of the silicon atoms with atoms of boron, arsenic, phosphorus, or other elements. If the added “dopant” atoms have more shareable electrons than the silicon atoms they replaced, the crystal as a whole ends up with extra electrons. Because electrons have a negative charge, the crystal becomes negatively charged. Similarly, if the dopant atoms have fewer shareable electrons, the doped crystal has, in effect, some electron-sized “holes”—it is positively charged. Like the electrons in the crystal, the “holes” are shared, meaning that their locations can move about somewhat in the way that physical electrons can move about. Fuller and Pearson placed a thin layer of the first type of doped silicon (extra electrons) atop a layer of the second type (extra holes). The two Bell researchers attached the little assembly to a circuit—a loop of wire,...