10:27 "We discovered something important today" easily qualifies as understatement of the century, possibly the millenium

@velisvideos6208

2 ай бұрын

It is very impressive that he did mention it to his wife. A normal male would just have grunted and gone for the highball or whatever they used to drink in New Jersey.

@andersjjensen

2 ай бұрын

"This theory takes for granted a force that works instantaneously over infinite distances. Only a madman could ever belive such a thing" -- Sir Issac Newton..... About his own theory of gravity that stood unchallenged for 228 before Einstein published general relativity, which can be reduced to Newtons formular with a "+ G" added at the end. I think that still holds the record for that particular millennium, as far as understating the importance of your own work goes.

@monad_tcp

2 ай бұрын

@@andersjjensenwhich still takes for granted the existence of some sort of electron-volt field and a lot of other fields, which is basically some sort of infinite ether, but modern physicists don't like when you say that fields are just ether with another name. (mathematically they're)

@spvillano

2 ай бұрын

@@velisvideos6208"Hi, honey, how was your day?" "We discovered something important today". Having a serious clue that anything after would be incomprehensible, "That's nice". A conversation I've actually held with my wife of over 41 years, now sorely missed. Explaining shit to senior executives, that was what I practiced with her. She was no dullard, but not being a specialist in the field, I had an up in preparing technical stuff with her in advance. Humorously, she advanced slightly faster than most executives in technological comprehension.

@andersjjensen

2 ай бұрын

@@monad_tcpNo. The ether theory specifically stipulates that "the ether" was a physical medium of some sort. Fields and "ethers" are fundamentally different.

I LOVE THE ASAINOMETRY KZread CHANNEL!!!

@VioletPrism

2 ай бұрын

ME TOO SIMPLY THE BEST!!!!!!

@waynesworldofsci-tech

2 ай бұрын

We all do. Damned solid stuff every week.

@rogerk6180

2 ай бұрын

We all do...

@Mateus01234

2 ай бұрын

It was not long ago that he only had like 20k subs. And one day I looked and he had 600k. Quality content.

@m35benvids87

2 ай бұрын

Its among the best

The amount of transistors this videosignal has gone trough from inception to my viewing is astronomical.

There is also another interesting documentary about how Sony tried to recreate the transistor because Japan was not allowed to see any details after the war or I think the parts were too expensive to import from US, so they had to grow the crystals in buckets and experiment from scratch. Back then, Sony was just 2 guys and completely unknown but they were the first to successfully recreate the transistor and create the first portable radio in Japan.

@spvillano

2 ай бұрын

Well, that $25k thing was a lot steep for post-war Japan. Seriously, it was. Japan was in ruins still into the 1950's and early '60's. But, they caught up, first with the joke of Made in Japan being of laughable quality to swiftly turning into industrial leaders. Call it bullshit flies in the face of global industry, where Six Sigma is a mantra and originated with Toyota. Introduced by Motorola, Toyota improved it to what it is today. Misapplied, well, the results are equally legendary and at the root of supply chain disruptions during the pandemic.

@yxyk-fr

2 ай бұрын

are you referring to kzread.info/dash/bejne/ioCgq8SYoJSXk7A.html ? Part 2 : kzread.info/dash/bejne/mIZ308qMf7G0mag.html

@yxyk-fr

2 ай бұрын

and kzread.info/dash/bejne/lKuct5ugn6bPkaw.html of course !

@cogoid

2 ай бұрын

Japan bought the transistor licence. As a standard part of the deal they were not only given the 800 page book with the theory and specific recipes, but they were also allowed to tour American transistor manufacturing, ask any questions and record everything. Which they did very diligently. The problem, of course, was that in the ruined Japan it was extremely hard to find the equipment and materials, and it took some heroic efforts to produce anything at all.

@Nourrights_psalm118.8

2 ай бұрын

Also thanks to Japan we have the lighting amd entertainment led's bc of creating a blue light emitting diode

after watching Nakamura LED discovery, compare to Nichia, AT&T seems like a good company not only promoting Shockly, Brattain, and Bardeen but also give them a credit as a leader in theory of transistor and semiconductor

@TheHilariousGoldenChariot

2 ай бұрын

From the historical research I’ve done on bell labs for some presentations for school. It seems it was a really groundbreaking organization both technologically and culturally. I always remember the famous video of Brain Kernighan with his feet on his desk at bell labs holmdel complex. The video is from “ The Unix system: Making Computers More Productive”.

@tomschmidt381

2 ай бұрын

I agree Bell Labs was responsible for a fantastic amount of technological advancement. However they were only interested in making telephone service cheaper and more efficient. So when it came to the battle of the netheads vs the bellheads they lost.

@phlogistanjones2722

2 ай бұрын

Bell Labs once was ***KNOWN*** to be "The Research Arm Of The Human Race". What judge Green did was a petty destruction of a grand endeavor. Some of us will not forget his act of barbarism. I fear we shall never see its like again.

@absalomdraconis

2 ай бұрын

​@@phlogistanjones2722 : Was that the fellow that decided to break up AT&T?

@doug9000

Ай бұрын

AT&T was almost a state owned company back then, almost all modern technology was invented with big and stable government money over time, contrary to what people usually say that market competition brings innovation.

I remember in the early 1950's there were articles on how you could make transistors using germanium diodes (you could not buy transistors a that time). My dad told me that researchers from Bell Labs gave a presentation on transistors at the IEE in London. At the end of their presentation, they threw a handful of transistors into the audience who then scrabbled around on the floor trying to grab one. He said that at the GPO Dollis Hill lab, they received their first transistor. They carefully mounted it in a clamp, ready to make measurements on the device. But they had crushed it in the clamp. Somewhere in a drawer, I have a GET-1 point contact transistor, GEC's first commercially sold transistor.

@yxyk-fr

2 ай бұрын

take pictures of it !!!

@ccshello1

2 ай бұрын

Google search Vintage GEC(UK) GET1 GET2 transistor should get you there

@ketfoen

2 ай бұрын

Wow, what a treasure 😮

@Doctorlockpick

2 ай бұрын

I guess they weren't careful enough.

@yxyk-fr

2 ай бұрын

@@Doctorlockpick we learn better from our mistakes 😀

There were a few other weird twists to the transistor story. A guy had something that acted like a transistor back in 1925 but didn't pursue the concept. The first transistors from Bell Labs were made mostly by accident, not to any specific theory. They put excess current into two of the point-contacts, which heated up the germanium around the contacts and by pure accident, created regions of varying plus and minus doping. Those transistors were very unpredictable and noisy. They came really close to making a field-effect transistor but not quite. It wasn't like almost ten years later that the very different FET device was mastered. Philco developed the surface-barrier transistor, a very high speed (for the time) but very fragile transistor. They cornered the market for very high speed transistors. They even built a $40 million special automated factory to make them. The plan was to sell the transistors for $35 to the military, maybe $5 for consumer transistor radios. The transistors were "fast" for their time, capable of 20 to 50 MHz operation, but at extremely low power levels, like 50 milliwatts tops. Unfortunately for them, the whole process was obsoleted by the much faster and rugged Fairchild silicon planar process by 1960.

@peterfireflylund

2 ай бұрын

> A guy had something that acted like a transistor back in 1925 but didn't pursue the concept. He patented it. Later, a myth was created that his idea didn't work. This myth was extremely convenient for Bell Labs. It later turned out, in the 90's, that it actually did work. Moreover, Bell Labs had actually built working devices based on his patents back in the 40's before "inventing" the transistor. Somehow, this hasn't worked its way into the textbooks yet. The same guy also invented the electrolytic capacitor.

@bearcb

2 ай бұрын

​@@peterfireflylundcould you please tell his name?

@peterfireflylund

2 ай бұрын

@@bearcb Julius Lilienfeld.

@bearcb

2 ай бұрын

@@peterfireflylund thanks!

@TheLegendaryHacker

2 ай бұрын

@@peterfireflylund Do you have a source on Bell Labs building devices based on Lilienfeld's design, in the 40s?

You know the rest. Shockley hired the best physicists. They soon were tired of Shockley eccentricities; one of those, i.e. giving them their salary thru the post, upset eight of them (including Moore and Noyce). So those eight bright mind left Shockley and formed Fairchild Semiconductor...

@yxyk-fr

2 ай бұрын

and then Intel, AMD, you name it...

@Idler_JP

2 ай бұрын

U no so much much but u cant rite proper like

@CATech1138

2 ай бұрын

eccentricities...LOL...the guy was an Fn kook!....

@PREDEX2000

2 ай бұрын

​@@Idler_JP lmao dis cat seething cuz sum words Truelly sadge

@nicholaskoa1371

Ай бұрын

@@Idler_JP MADGE LOL

Bardeen went on to make important contributions to quantum mechanics.

@phlogistanjones2722

2 ай бұрын

YOU LIE! We have no idea how quantum mechanics works. You are all wizards who wish to ensorcell us and make us your minions... not the cute yellow kind. The icky kind with humps an' wot not. signed: Abby Normal :) Peaceful Skies.

@organicfarm5524

2 ай бұрын

and he got two Nobel prizes as well

@Martinit0

2 ай бұрын

Bardeen is the "B" of BCS-theory, the theory of how superconductors work.

As a studying Electrical Engineer the context this brings to my studies is beyond words. Thank you for the work and love you put into these videos.

@tictacdude3468

2 ай бұрын

Even as a studying Mechanical Engineer, I still feel the same. Asianometry’s technical history videos are a gem.

@stachowi

2 ай бұрын

I’m an EE and would have loved to have KZread and these resources (including ChatGPT)

@TheHilariousGoldenChariot

2 ай бұрын

@@stachowiI’m in school for CE and if it’s not for Jon and Asianometry I probably would have lost motivation 2 semesters ago.

@chipdipleraka7343

2 ай бұрын

I just went PP and i still like these videos.

@Estrav.Krastvich

Ай бұрын

@@tictacdude3468 Truly are. Epic.

"This is not a scientific diagram. Please don't come at me" Subscribed.

Just a quick word. I the early days, what they called a "detector" or radio frequency detector, was just a (relatively) high frequency low current diode. For amplitude modulation, if you perform half wave rectification of an RF signal, you are left with high frequency DC waves with AM modulation. Those high frequency components of the DC signal would be rolled off by the primitive circuits of the day, and thus leave just the DC AM modulation. Thus even a point contact diode could receive AM broadcast on a strong signal, especially if listened to with headphones. Thus they called them "detectors", really just a rectifier in today's language.

As a US baby boomer I always find these technical history lessons fascinating. I graduated 8th grade in 1961 and for graduation my parents bought me a Motorola 6-transsistor AM radio. Wish I still had it but it succumbed to hobbyist tinkering. One factoid I was not aware of was that Western Electric tried to commercially produce the point contact transistor. You paint a somewhat more generous analysis of William Shockley then I was aware of.

@spvillano

2 ай бұрын

Thank you for making me feel young. I was born in '61. Did the electron tube, transistor, IC, VLSI conversions quite well enough. At least capacitors and resistors didn't change their behavior... ; Odd though, no selenium was mentioned in the documentary.

@tomschmidt381

2 ай бұрын

@@spvillano Funny you mentioned that, yeah selenium rectifiers are a pretty nasty piece of work. In 8-th grade I built a vacuum tube (valve on the other side of the pond) proximity detector from an article in Popular Electronics. Several years ago I ran across a site that had scanned a bunch of old magazines and it had that article. Thought it would be fun to build it again. I've always been fascinated with thyratrons, think SCRs with pilot lights. It used a half wave selenium rectifier to generate the bias voltage, in the rebuild I subtitled a silicon diode. The physic of capacitors and resistors has not changed over the years but now I can hardly see them. As a result I still use through hole for my DIY projects. I picked a good time to be born and reach adulthood, during the early days of the microprocessor. No one knew how to use them so lots of opportunity back in those days.

@spvillano

2 ай бұрын

@@tomschmidt381heh, just yesterday I ran into a video on ancient Cold War telephones used for Civil Defense siren activation and the host mentioned cold cathode thyratrons, albeit not by name. Recognized the technology instantly, we had a class on the damned things back in 1979. A buddy and I had a contest on who could get the thing to glow brighter...

@nicholaskoa1371

Ай бұрын

thank u both for making me feel really young! ha ha. Born in 1990, tinkering all my life with electronics. Really, though, my generation and beyond still have tinkerers and those looking up at the sky; rest easy knowing that we still appreciate pioneers great and small for letting us stand on your shoulders to see such a beautiful world. I still use through-hole for some of my more esoteric/artistic projects, Tom, but primarily work with SOIC small package as a standard, and although I never had good eyes to begin with. They are very hard to see without a microscope for me, but we get by that way. the integration of heat table/air for soldering assembly really has been a wonder and boon in that regard, as well.

Great to see some early transistor history! My father grew up in Eastern Washington state and is a professor of Electrical Engineering (in semiconductor lasers). For the past decade or so when we visit his old hometown (Omak, WA) we take a quick trip to Tonasket WA to try to find the original Brattain homestead. My dad was always excited that someone who came out of a tiny town in Eastern Washington, riding on horseback, went on to great success shaping the semiconductor industry and won a Nobel prize. We've tracked out over some pretty wild lands, but haven't found conclusive evidence of the old Brattain homestead yet.

I went to work at TI in 1973 and remember the guys talking about the good 'ol days when they could sell a transistor for $40. Ah, the older I get, the better I was.

@yxyk-fr

2 ай бұрын

they are still 40 bucks... on eBay :-D fuzz pedal makers crave them.

@realryder2626

Ай бұрын

Some of the old sprague bumblebees and such can fetch $500+ EACH!!

@yxyk-fr

Ай бұрын

@@realryder2626 but what for ? They are fragile as hell...

@realryder2626

Ай бұрын

@@yxyk-fr switching pickups on old fender electric guitars and such

@16:29 together with the opening shot until @00:33 , you really can see where the bipolar Transistor Symbol (still in use today for NPN or PNP) literally evolved from the reality of these first transistors. A triangles tip is pressed on a base of semiconductor material below it. The triangle has (goldfoil) contacts for emitter and collector on each side, in an angle of 90 degrees between them, both 45 degrees raised from the ground. The base of the Transistor, modulating the Signals between emitter and collector tips is down below this triangles tip, just like the connector for a base of a transistor, still used in today's schematics. (I'm working with this stuff for over 40 years now and never saw it that way, that the base was historical the big chunky thing, but it was like this only in the first Labs, not anymore in mass manufacturing containing a very thin layered sandwich with a plastic housing around it.)

@yxyk-fr

2 ай бұрын

that's right :-) IBM used the junction transistor symbol, for a while in the early 60s, and dropped it later...

Wow, flashbacks to my father work back in the day, was one of the first PCB production facilities in the U.S later work on space program and super computers and my favorite was fine line plating equipment and technology that we worked on together.

Looking at the physical layout of the triangular shape with the two points at the end, and seeing the sketch at 13:54 ... Just NOW it becomes clear to me why the transistor symbol is the way it is. After I've played with Transistors for the last 40 years. #TIL

As of 2024, we can still purchase point contact diode. Most of the vintage old stock ones have clear glass package. Through the glass, you can see "cat whisker" through a bit of spring tension pushing against a pad of Germanium semiconductor surface. 1N60 diode is the typical one to be found, just have to be careful, majority of the online sellers are using the Silicon schottky diode as the imitation (fake) parts.

@yxyk-fr

2 ай бұрын

1N34 is common too 🙂

@marianl8718

Ай бұрын

Interestingly, these old point contact glass diodes can operate at incredibly high frequencies, even above 1 GHz. With such a diode, the signals emitted by a mobile phone can be easily highlighted.

@yxyk-fr

Ай бұрын

@@marianl8718 Just a few hours ago I saw on FB a circuit that uses a LED as rectifier for AM reception 😀

Blows my mind that no transistor existed 76 years ago. I know people older than that. The house I grew up in was built before the transistor.

I still find it awesome when you show the old RCA building ( @ 20:04) in Camden, NJ .... I've seen that building a thousand times and had no idea it was such an iconic piece of history.... but when you showed it for the first time I recognized that blue "Camden Waterfront' sign and realized what it was.... if you look on the left side of the pic, in the background, those building are Center City Philadelphia, and on the far right side of the pic you can see the Ben Franklin Bridge.... A little piece of my small world shown to me through the eyes of technological history from one fo the SMARTEST CHANNELS on KZread :)

@0neIntangible

2 ай бұрын

What is the Clock Tower depicting where the circular clock dial is? Btw, this RCA building is a wonderful vintaged example of early 20th century architecture.

@ccshello1

2 ай бұрын

Just a small comment: That building is RCA-VICTOR's HQ building nicknamed The Nipper* Building. It is mainly Victor, the record player/record company (view it as a BU or division.) RCA has a BU called Solid State Division, its HQ is located in Somerville New Jersey. * Nipper is the dog sitting next to the old sonogram with the big horn loudspeaker.

I worked at Bell Labs from '80-'88. A bit past its prime, but still a pretty cool place to work. Murry Hill was kind of like a science Mecca. And a great shout out for Purdue!

It is also worth mentioning that many more people contributed to the replacement of vacuum tubes. One of them is Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, a Polish-American physicist who proposed the field-effect transistor. See patents: US 1745175 "Method and Apparatus for Controlling Electric Currents" from 1925, US 1900018 "Device for Controlling Electric Currents" filed in 1928, and US 1877140 "Amplifier for Electric Currents" from the same year.

@yxyk-fr

Ай бұрын

it was mentioned quickly... but a detailed documentary would run for 4 hours at least !

This is awesome! I love your channel so much, thank you for your work! I appreciate details like this deeply, because it makes it clear what details of a technology are meaningful and which are just path-dependent idiosyncrasies. The search for tube replacement, the name "transistor" itself, the idea for planar technology and ICs, even the choice of packaging for 4004 - all these details matter, it's the difference between remembering a fact and understanding the causality and meaning of ideas. One more thing that I oftentimes do after your videos is looking up interviews, notes and papers of the people involved, and listen to their direct speech. We're lucky to have many of them captured on film and audio, and many are still alive!

And here we see the Book of Genesis, efficiently condensed into 25 minutes and presented with great confidence. Very well done, excellent video.

Wow! Also the mentioned article on "how the 1st transistor worked" is very much worth the read.

This guy just spits quality after quality material. I did know this story but you gave it a new dimension. I mean, it is just really good to follow.

Fun fact. There are about 15.000.000.000 transistors in an iphone. With a productiontime of 8400 transistors a month, it will take 148.809 years to have enough for 1 iphone.

@peterlarkin762

2 ай бұрын

About 60 trillion transistors were created while I read your comment:)

@cogoid

2 ай бұрын

That is just in the CPU itself. If you also count memory transistors, the number is easily 100 times greater.

Man this is maybe one of your best vids, really enjoyed it.

Compared to the theoretical explanation of how a device is found, the demonstration of the experiments helps me understand the working mechanism more. It also sheds light on how we need to discover new devices, allowing us to see how the history of science progresses gradually.

The video itself is a banquet of information, simplified for viewers like me I can only imagine the hours of work and resources required to have brought this technology to life 🤯

@yxyk-fr

2 ай бұрын

it's an endless rabbit hole so the real merit is going back to real life and report about the trip 😀

0:04 Amazing what Buster Bluth was up to in the 1940s. Joking aside, love your videos, keep up the great work

I love this three inch process node transistor.

Czochralski (pronounced choh-hral-ski [cho from chocolate, [for the hr just say both close together], al from pal, and ski from ski [i guess]) first worked at my small city of 30k. There isnt even a street about him. Source i am polish (and ipn/wikipedia)

@1pcfred

2 ай бұрын

Forget about that I cringed at how he pronounced Sylvania.

Awsome video! Thank you for explaining the advent and development of the transistor with details that other presentations haven't described in this clear and concise way. Also, the amount of research that must have went into producing this video. Kudos!

Your content is always first to none because of the news you provide of the semiconductor world. As I work for Applied Materials and your channel helps me stay current to what’s happening. But this content here is Absolutely brilliant. Well done and can’t wait to see what this amazing channel brings! Cheers from Austin Texas!! ❤

Hey! I sat next to Glen Zorpette as a summer intern at IEEE Spectrum between my junior and senior year as an EE student. Excellent tech journalist.

21:00 Mataré and friends invented/discovered the point-contact transistor separately and almost simultaneously ... They didn't even try to "copy" it, in fact Shockley was shocked that the French Telephone company would use their own design for long distance transmission with better quality than in the US. The story on the Soviet side is more murky and convoluted, due to paranoid secrecy and duplication of works because the labs were strongly compartimented.

@Schlipperschlopper

Ай бұрын

German scientists built transistors in 1944 and early 1945. Those first transistors (called not Transistor in Germany but DUO-Diode or Kristalltriode) were made during late WW2 in Germany by three AEG/ Telefunken and Siemens scientists Matthias Falter, Heinrich Welker und Herbert-Francois Mataré for Forschungsanstalt der Deutschen Reichspost at Kloster Leubus later relocated to an underground lab called B3C (Codename "Jonas") near Niedersachswerfen. Those early transistors replaced micro electron tubes in missile guiding system for example inside the V101 Skoda medium range rocket by Dr. Teichmann and Dr. Rolf Engel.

@yxyk-fr

Ай бұрын

@@Schlipperschlopper I have no online reference about the use of duodiodes, I have only found that they were invented in hope of cancelling noise in the radar rectifiers. "interference" was observed but from the little I had found, no amplifying device was built. Mataré and friends were hired in France to build a diode manufacture and brought the idea with them and could at last make a working device, which was quickly (and shortly) adopted by the French State. But point-contact devices have many shortcomings that later alloyed types would overcome and it was too late for the French. Some people have traced / located early Transistrons in museums and private collections, but never heard of any predating device. Please can you provide more information ?

@chickenfishhybrid44

Ай бұрын

Reference for Shockley being "shocked" and the better quality? Where did you find this?

@yxyk-fr

Ай бұрын

@@chickenfishhybrid44 I remember finding this mentioned in maybe 2 different recollections, I will see if I can find them 6 months after my SSD crashed. From what I remember : Mataré & colleagues were brought to France by Westinghouse to make diodes, and the duodiode became the Transistron, a few months after the prototype at Bell Labs but before the announcement. When Westinghouse France heard about it (june 30, 1948), they rushed to patent their own version (aug. 13th, 1948), which angered Bell Labs as they could only patent their own (Bardeen-Bratten) design. And the Lilienfeld "omission", so Shockley was already on the edge. Westinghouse trademarked their device as "Westcrel" and worked quickly with PTT (French Postes/Télégraphes/Téléphones) so a batch of 1000 Transistrons was ordered and manufactured. I don't know if those ended up in the telephone relays but they were used in the cable between Algeria and Paris, which was demonstrated to Shockley during his visit to France in 1950. The Westrcrel has higher bandwidth than the GE part, however Shockley was already working on better devices, faster and less fragile. I'll see if I can find details or even the article that mentions Shockley's 1950 visit. I'll have to dig through tens of resources...

@yxyk-fr

Ай бұрын

seems my reply didn't make it through@@chickenfishhybrid44 .... not the first time though, maybe it was too long ? digging through my notes, transistronised telephone relays appeared in France in 1949 according to an article scan. Also found this quote in a radiomuseum org page (lookup with google because yt comments don't allow urls) " Herbert F. Mataré and Heinrich Welker developed with Westinghouse of Paris a similar mechanism as a transistor and patented this “Transitron” some months later than the Americans, on August 13 1948. They worked before at Siemens on radar technology and did research on “point-contact diode” ED705 as mixer-detector for cm-wave (also ED704, ED707). The Mataré-Welker mechanism led to telephone amplifiers between France and Algeria in 1950. " Bandwidth and gain figures are hard to find. The current might have been 10 to 30mA because the cats whiskers were really tiny. I have found several mentions of better French quality but we all know it was a dead end anyway and politics spoiled everything, Mataré created Intermetal in 1952, not in France... Contact me personally for more references and direct links.

Brilliant! Thank you so much. I knew a few bits & details about that story. I didn't know it in anything like that level of detail. That was fascinating. I have heard / read some of the names of those early devices, but nobody ever broke down what they actually were or how they were first made. Once again, excellent work. This is why I subscribed.

This is one of many types of videos i needed to find, thank you for making this! Saved.

7:00 So Shockley's actually wanted to build FET transistor, as you correctly described in 6:45 and referred to as silicon version of vacuum tube. This is correct as vacuum tube and FET works on the principle of electric field as modulation force (gate field). Though in 7:00 you started talking about current and bipolar transistors which was a side effect of trials from Shockley's team after several failed attempts on building FET. I actually got a problem by invalid explanation of how transistors work's by some individual in the early days of my education so I immediately spotted that ;) Just thinking it might be important for others as well ;)

Thank you for the video. It is always a pleasure to learn about something from you. Your cadence, tone and inflection are most pleasing. Peaceful Skies.

Another note: one of the drivers of the first transistorized computers was the realization that flip flops build with transistors could be built that were far more tolerant of variations in transistor manufactured parameters than analog applications such as radios. When attempting to make transistors with stable parameters for consumer applications, the method used was to mass manufacture them, test their parameters, and live with a high rejection rate. As a result, the computer makers were able to come in and buy up lots of "defective" transistors for use in computers that couldn't be used for consumer electronics.

@yxyk-fr

2 ай бұрын

yes, that's part of the Seymour Cray early legends. But as soon as he/CDC could, they ordered custom gold-doped 2N709 silicon NPNs from Fairchild 🙂 (corrected, thanks MrGGPRI)

@MrGGPRI

Ай бұрын

I believe you mean 2N709 which is common silicon switcher...

@yxyk-fr

Ай бұрын

yup @@MrGGPRI that was a typo 🙂sorry

To this day radios in my country are colloquially referred to as transistors.

@DraTohru_XLN

Ай бұрын

In my country China, many old people also called the radio as “半导体”(semiconductor).

The invention of the transistor is on of my favorite stories that also happens to be an actual reality. This is a good representation, but the characters involved deserve much more background story IMO. And then the follow up of how Sony engineers were able to reverse engineer and recreate the experiment in the rubble of Tokio with nothing but their own savings and sheer determination.

@swlak516

2 ай бұрын

Agreed, would really like to hear the Sony story

4:52 The Eagle-Picher company also made the batteries for the Apollo moon missions.

This is gonna be a good one. Love the history and technicality as I learn electrical engineering and industrial control. Keep it up Asianometry

I think I got my first CK722s in 1960. I remember being very thrilled. I was 16.

@cjay2

2 ай бұрын

I got my first CK722s in 1961. I was 12. What a life.

Excited for this vid

You have this format down to a science. Keep up the awesome work 🎉

Very well done, I thoroughly enjoyed watching this. Thank you for this.

From the first transistor to the latest and greatest "mixed-dimensional 1D GaAsSb/2D MoS2 heterotransistors" studied by Johnny Ho of City University of Hong Kong .. What a journey .. Could we ask the favor of you finding out from the professor what this new breakthrough transistor is all about and how exactly it is going to change the semiconductor industry ? You make it so easy for average Joe to listen and catch on ..

@aeonikus1

Ай бұрын

Great idea for next video!

An Amazing video, the quality of information and explanation is truly mind blowing. Can't wait for more.

Hey Jon, love your insanely detailed videos on semi-conductor companies. Would love to see one on Texas Instruments.

Dude, you keep putting out great content, regularly!!!

I dropped outta college and I LOVE THE ASIANOMETRY KZread CHANNEL!!!!

"Crystal Fire" by Lillian Hoddeson and Michael Riordan is a great book which describes the events at Bell Labs in detail. What a story! Real life is often stranger than fiction.

@yxyk-fr

2 ай бұрын

I'd read it.

Basically an elaboration of crystal radios, but with more theory and purer materials. I guess the galena (lead sulfide) crystal acted like a diode, and by moving the wire whisker one could find a surface area that corresponded to the frequency desired. The tube amplifier performance was the goal, but the idea of solid state was there from the get-go, just a matter of finding the correct solid state materials.(and a heck of a lot of other engineering details). You could probably do an entire episode on the significance of purification, and how important extremely high purity of semiconductor elements has become...... So cool, thank you kindly for another thought provoking video...

Great presentation, but you missed the part about Lilienfeld's pre-WW2 transistor patent. He was trying to make field effect transistors with metal oxide devices. Bell Labs eventually learned about Lillienfeld's work. I have seen those first generation point contact transistors that resemble a bronze bolt. A lab in the basement of the building I worked in, at NASA's Ames Research Center had some, along with some other equally old components. They predate NASA and may have been procured by NACA in the early '50s. The engineers who worked in that lab, when I was there, were developing spaceflight hardware that used microcontrollers. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Edgar_Lilienfeld

simply glad that you're making videos, carry on

Great historical once again! Like the old saying goes "The devil is in the details!" I certainly appreciate the thoroughness that made this documentary less patchy than others I have seen.

@yxyk-fr

2 ай бұрын

There are several documentaries such as PBS' "Transistorized!" kzread.info/dash/bejne/h2iMzdCAodWZctI.html and others, such as a Japanese retrospective. longer, less technical but has some extra context.

This is quality learning ! I love this channel ❤

Transistors were analogous to carbon-filament bulbs. Bell Labs did not invent the first transistor, or even the practical transistor. Instead, they only had another practical transistor besides the earlier FETs of the 1920s, but they also had Shockley's new semiconductor physics, and that made all the difference. Before their Bipolar Transistor breakthrough, Bell Labs had been trying to patent the FET, but hit a wall, because J.E. Lilienfeld already had working MOSFETs twenty years earlier, all covered by multiple patents. It was Lilienfeld, not Shockley, who applied e-fields to thin conductive films, and observed conductivity-modulation, with, as Bell Lab later said, "useful gain." An eyewitness even reported that Lilienfeld was showing around a 4-transistor radio to various manufacturers in the 1930s. The Bell Labs project even included an attempt to duplicate Lilienfeld's transistors, and they succeeded at this, but kept very quiet about it. (When they published the first BJT paper, they simultaneously published the results of testing the Lilienfeld FET, but without revealing this, in that "current modulation" paper. Also, Bell Labs people constantly stated that Lilienfeld was a theorist who never built the FETs in his patents. (They knew this how?) No, Lilienfeld was an experimentalist, with no semiconductor theory, had built an entire transistor radio receiver, even patenting it, and besides, Bell had replicated successful Lilienfeld FETs, even though they concealed this fact when publishing the results! ) Because of decades-old prior art, they couldn't patent anything involving FETs, and besides, old FET patents were now in public-domain, impossible for anyone to own the invention. They were stuck. Transistors couldn't be a money-making product. Fortunately for them, their invention of the BJT broke this jam. But we'd never know all of this dirty back-story, if we listen only to Bell Labs, just as we'd never hear about all the earlier incandescent light bulbs if we only listen to GE and Thomas Edison. (Heh, DO NOT LOOK AT THE LILIENFELD MOSFET BEHIND THE CURTAIN! IT WILL ONLY CONFUSE YOU!) History really really really is written by the winners (didn't we already know this? Or do we only give it lip-service, while disbelieving?) We're only taught a dishonest version of tech-breakthroughs, particularly when it involves large corporations (Note well that Bell Labs is a business, and so expected to tell lies constantly, if it involves invention priority and corporate propaganda.) Westinghouse, the winner of the AC/DC battle, lit the entire Chicago worlds fair with tens of thousands of non-Edison light bulbs, after underbidding Edison on the contract. The earlier Sawyer-Mann carbon-filament bulb had been a failure: short operating lifetime, and a glued stopper to allow filaments to be replaced. But they worked well enough for use at the world's fair, with many hundreds of workers swapping out the constant stream of dead bulbs. .

I did not see that Malcolm Gladwell throwdown coming... Great video. 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼

@tami6867

2 ай бұрын

How can your comment be 2 month old? the vid is only online for minutes

@bluestar2253

2 ай бұрын

@@tami6867 glitch in the matrix. This dude is a time traveler.

@0neIntangible

2 ай бұрын

@@tami6867 Patreon channel supporters are granted early access.

thanks to john's channel, i have approximate knowledge of so many things

Thank you, Jon! Another great video.

Seriously dude your channel has quickly become one of my favorite channels ever and I've been on KZread since the earliest of days lol. Great job! Also just wanted to give you my thanks and gratitude for providing me so many hours of top tier entertainment. I know a life of a creator can be a lonely and thankless job but I do very much appreciate all your hard work and thanks again!

I worked for Northern Telecom Systems Corporation (NTSC) in the '70s. Their parent company was Bell Northern Research Labs that claimed the invention of the transistor.

I understand this Bardeen fellow is quite clever.

I grew up (and now live in) the city where EaglePicher is located. I never knew they were involved in transistors, just knew their battery history. Now I gotta go ask some old guys what they remember...

great work as always

Thank for producing this educational video!

This is brilliant! Thank you.

Great video. This is going to do numbers for sure

Wonderful presentation!

Appreciating the deep dive into the transistor's legacy. It sparks curiosity about how future materials will further revolutionize technology

2:16 diagram just shows ac and dc current in a steady state. A rectifier will result in a sort of square wave: up when the ac goes up and then no current when the ac goes negative.

A good book about this and other developments at Bell Labs is "The Idea Factory"

The first transistor radio was sold by I.D.E.A. and the brand was Regency. The model was the TR-1 The transistors were from Texas Instruments. This was around 1954.

@yxyk-fr

2 ай бұрын

and prototypes were demonstrated a year earlier at trade shows.

@peterlarkin762

2 ай бұрын

The tr1 cost 10 dollars each at the time and they sold the radios at a loss. I think they became profitable a few months later when production costs came down.

You’re killing it

Eventually that alloy junction transistor made it down to the undergrad EE lab level. I remember making one back in the mid 70's. Just like the diagram, a predoped wafer with a couple spots of indium melted in under an argon gas flow. The trick was to heat it long enough to get a thin base layer, but no so long as to short it our,

@yxyk-fr

Ай бұрын

Now THAT's an interesting comment ! This fabrication method has long been forgotten...

I some how expected Paul Harvey at the end... "And now you know _the rest_ of the story." 😁 That was fascinating, thank you.

Amazing how after someone proves it is possible, many others, independently, can make one by their selves. Just like after Alberto Santos Dumont flew for the first time an airplane in the world. After that, aviation finally started to develop.

I keep begging you to do the industry of Japanese hi-fi entertainment. You even started with the first transistor radio from Sony, where it all began. Do the rest until it ends in the early 00s. Unless you want me to pay you to do it. I can do that too~

I remember explaining to my grandma how a transistor works, and she lamented that she didn't take physics. I then realized that at the time she was in high school or even college, the curriculum taught would have never been updated with transistors or semi conductors in mind.

The Idea Factory book details these developments. Excellent work Asianometry

Asianometry is one of THEE channels on YT

Damnit ! I did a thorough research on this historical subject several months ago 😀

I wish I had a dvd box of all the episodes i watched of yourse

It's amazing how the vision of everyone involved in this endeavor shaped our world nearly a hundred years later. Thanks for so many people's genius and dedication.

0:05 actually the zero hour is 12am Jan 1 1970

An astounding story!

That deserves a fiver!! my great uncle, who also worked on colossus helped make the Manchester computers (22:35)

Do you imagine our actual world _WITHOUT_ the transistor..? Greetings from Argentina❤

Thanks!

Ida liked to know the voltages they were experimenting with back then. Im guessing 5 volts?

@cogoid

2 ай бұрын

The December 24, 1947 drawing from the notebook (13:53) shows the collector battery of 90V, and the emitter battery 2-3 volts.

@yxyk-fr

2 ай бұрын

@@cogoid Daaaamn.... that may have explained why they had so many problems making something work. They were used to vacuum tubes and their surroundings. Soon after the voltages were reduced to 21 or 9V, when the breakdown voltage effect is understood.

Liked and commented, love your work output!

I watched a great doco on this via Amazon Prime video " Silicon Valley American Experience"

Had to look that up, tho it's obvious from context - Esaki diode == tunnel diode, interesting device with negative resistance.

What an amazing topic