When Was the Transistor Invented?

The point-contact transistor — a small germanium crystal with two gold contacts — was demonstrated on 16 December 1947 at Bell Labs. Bardeen and Brattain built the device; Shockley, their supervisor, developed the more practical junction transistor shortly after. The transistor replaced bulky, power-hungry, heat-producing vacuum tubes, launching the electronics revolution. By the late 1950s, transistors were being miniaturised onto integrated circuits. The trio shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Today, a single chip can contain over 100 billion transistors, each just a few nanometres across. The transistor is arguably the most important invention of the 20th century, enabling everything from radios and televisions to smartphones, computers, the internet, and artificial intelligence.