The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 40

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Shortly after Christmas, Shockley took the train to Chicago to attend two conferences, but he spent most of his time in his room at the Bismarck Hotel devising a revised method for creating the device. On New Year’s Eve, as partygoers danced in the ballroom below, he wrote seven pages of notes on lined graph paper. When he woke up on New Year’s Day of 1948, he wrote thirteen more. These he sent by airmail back to a colleague at Bell Labs who glued them into Shockley’s lab notebook and asked Bardeen to sign them as a witness.

By then Mervin Kelly had assigned one of the Bell Lab attorneys to produce, as fast as possible, a set of patent applications for the new device. This was not Iowa State, where there was no one on staff to handle such a task. When Shockley returned from Chicago, he discovered that Bardeen and Brattain had already been consulted, and he was upset. He called them into his office separately and explained why he should get the primary—perhaps even sole—credit. “He thought,” Brattain recalled, “that he could write a patent, starting with the field effect, on the whole damn thing.” Bardeen was characteristically silent, though he did mutter bitterly once it was over. Brattain, as was his wont, was blunt. “Oh hell, Shockley,” he yelled. “There’s enough glory in this for everybody.”³⁰

Shockley pressed Bell’s lawyers to apply for a very broad patent based on his own initial insight about how a field effect could influence current in a semiconductor. But in their research the lawyers discovered that a patent had been granted in 1930 to a little-known physicist named Julius Lilienfeld, who had proposed (but never built or understood) a device using the field effect. So they decided to pursue a patent for the more narrow invention of a point-contact method of making a semiconductor device, and the only names on that particular application would be Bardeen and Brattain. The attorneys questioned the two of them separately, and both said that it had been a joint effort in which each of them contributed equally. Shockley was furious that he was being left off the most important of the patent applications. Bell executives tried to paper over the rift by requiring that all publicity photos and press releases include all three men.

Over the next few weeks, Shockley became increasingly disconcerted, so much so that he had trouble sleeping.³¹ His “will to think,” as he called it, was driven by “my own motivation to play a more significant personal, rather than managerial, role in what was obviously a development of enormous potential importance.”³² At odd hours of the night, he would pace around searching for better ways to make the device. Early on the morning of January 23, 1948, a month after the demonstration of the Bardeen-Brattain invention, Shockley woke up with an insight that pulled together the thinking he had done on his trip to Chicago. Sitting at his kitchen table, he began writing furiously.

Shockley’s idea involved a way to make a semiconductor amplifier that was less rickety than the contrivance that Bardeen and Brattain had rigged up. Instead of jamming gold points into a slab of germanium, Shockley envisioned a simpler “junction” approach that looked like a sandwich. It would have a top and bottom layer of germanium that had been doped with impurities so that they had an excess of electrons, and sandwiched between them would be a thin slice of germanium that had holes or a deficit of electrons. The layers with an excess of electrons were called “n-type” germanium, for negative, and the layer with a deficit or holes where electrons could be was called “p-type,” for positive. Each of the layers would be attached to a wire that allowed its voltage to be tweaked. The middle layer would be an adjustable barrier that, depending how turned on it was by voltage, regulated the current of electrons that flowed between the top and bottom layers. Applying a small positive voltage to this barrier would, Shockley wrote, “increase the flow of electrons over the barrier exponentially.” The stronger the charge on this inside p-type layer, the more it would suck electrons from one outside n-type layer to the other. In other words, it could amplify or switch off the current going through the semiconductor—and do so in mere billionths of a second.

Shockley put some notes in his lab book, but he kept his idea secret for almost a month. “I had a competitive urge to make some important transistor inventions on my own,” he later conceded.³³ He did not tell his colleagues until mid-February, when they were at a presentation of some related work by a Bell Labs scientist. Shockley recalled being “startled” when the scientist presented some findings that supported the theoretical basis for a junction device, and he realized that someone in the audience, most likely Bardeen, might take the logical next steps. “From that point on,” he asserted, “the concept of using p-n junctions rather than metal point contacts would have been but a small step and the junction transistor would have been invented.” So before Bardeen or anyone else could suggest such a device, Shockley leaped up and took the stage to reveal the design he had been working on. “I did not want to be left behind on this one,” he later wrote.³⁴

Bardeen and Brattain were taken aback. The fact that Shockley had been so secretive about his new idea—thus violating the code of sharing that was part of the Bell culture—upset them. Yet they could not help but be impressed by the simple beauty of Shockley’s approach.

After patent applications for both methods had been filed, the Bell Labs brass decided it was time to make the new device public. But first they needed a name for it. Internally it had been called a “semiconductor triode” and a “surface-state amplifier,” but those were not catchy enough names for an invention that, they correctly believed, would revolutionize the world. One day a colleague named John Pierce wandered into Brattain’s office. In addition to being a good engineer, he was a clever wordsmith who wrote science fiction under the pseudonym J. J. Coupling. Among his many quips were “Nature abhors a vacuum tube” and “After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy.” Brattain declared, “You’re just the man I want to see.” He posed the naming question, and after just a moment Pierce came up with a suggestion. Since the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.³⁵

On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”³⁶ That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age.

The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment, and Bill didn’t have anything to do with it.”³⁷

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