Abstract

No invention has so changed the arc of history as the transistor, the fundamental element of computers that do so much for us now, and with artificial intelligence (AI) promise—threaten?—to do more in the future. The transistor was born in the laboratories of the Bell Telephone System in response to a problem: how to deal with the exponential growth of the telephone system. Building on the new ideas of quantum mechanics, the transistor was the invention of three disparate figures, Walter Brattain, the experimenter, John Bardeen, the theorist, and William Shockley, the egomaniacal inspiration for the project for which they jointly won a Nobel Prize. While Brattain stayed at Bell Labs, Bardeen went off to academia and won a second Nobel Prize. Shockley, seeking his fortune, went on to found “Silicon Valley” by failing in his own entrepreneurial venture and scattering the seeds of a new industry. Unable to understand his failure, Shockley became a recluse with no friends besides his wife Emmy, and began to promote ideas of eugenics, claiming to show by statistics that blacks were inferior and that it was a genetic problem that couldn’t be corrected by social programs. Only Emmy attended his funeral.