Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

Shockley soon built such a device, expecting that applying and removing an electric field on top of the piece of silicon could make it function like a valve, opening and closing the flow of electrons across the silicon. When he ran this experiment, however, he was unable to detect a result. “Nothing measurable,” he explained. “Quite mysterious.” In fact, the simple instruments of the 1940s were too imprecise to measure the tiny current that was flowing. Two years later, two of Shockley’s colleagues at Bell Labs devised a similar experiment on a different type of device. Where Shockley was proud and obnoxious, his colleagues Walter Brattain, a brilliant experimental physicist from a cattle ranch in rural Washington, and John Bardeen, a Princeton-trained scientist who’d later become the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in physics, were modest and mild-mannered. Inspired by Shockley’s theorizing, Brattain and Bardeen built a device that applied two gold filaments, each attached by wires to a power source and to a piece of metal, to a block of germanium, with each filament touching the germanium less than a millimeter apart from the other. On the afternoon of December 16, 1947, at Bell Labs’ headquarters, Bardeen and Brattain switched on the power and were able to control the current surging across the germanium. Shockley’s theories about semiconductor materials had been proven correct.