Man made Optical Quartz (?)

at Bell Labs actually made the first silicon transistor, but he felt “it didn’t look attractive” from a manufacturing point of view.

The speaker’s words were at once laconic and electrifying. “Contrary to what my colleagues have told you about the bleak prospects for silicon transistors,” he proclaimed in his matter-of-fact voice, “I happen to have a few of them here in my pocket.”

Silicon transistors? Did he say silicon transistors?

Yes—among the few in the world at that moment. It was 10 May 1954.

A long and till-then uneventful session on silicon devices had been winding down at the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) National Conference on Airborne Electronics, in Dayton, Ohio. There, a parade of engineers and scientists were lamenting the sobering challenges of developing and eventually manufacturing silicon transistors. Amid the torpor, scattered attendees were stifling yawns, glancing at watches, and nodding off. But that was before Gordon Teal of Texas Instruments Inc. made his surprising announcement—and jaws dropped in disbelief.

“Did you say you have silicon transistors in production?” asked a stupefied listener about 10 rows back in the audience, which now began to perk up noticeably.

“Yes, we have three types of silicon transistors in production,” Teal replied, pulling several out of his pocket to the general amazement and envy of the crowd. Then, in a bit of quaint but effective razzle-dazzle, he cranked up a record player, which began blaring out the swinging sounds of Artie Shaw’s big-band hit, “Summit Ridge Drive.” Amplified by germanium transistors, the music died out instantly as Teal dunked one into a beaker of hot oil. But when he repeated his demonstration immersing a silicon transistor instead, the music played on without faltering.

As his talk ended, Teal mentioned that copies of his paper on the subject, innocuously titled “Some Recent Developments in Silicon and Germanium Materials and Devices,” were available near the rear door. A crowd stampeded back to get them, leaving the final speaker of the session without an audience. Minutes later, a Raytheon engineer was overheard in the lobby shouting into a telephone: “They’ve got the silicon transistor down in Texas!”

At the time, the silicon transistor seemed to be one of the first major breakthroughs in transistor development not to occur at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., where physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain had invented the transistor in December 1947. Their device featured two closely spaced metal points jabbed delicately into a germanium surface—hence its name, the “point-contact” transistor. They called one point the “emitter” and the other point the “collector,” while a third contact, known as the “base,” was applied to the back side of the germanium sliver. A positive electrical bias on the emitter enhanced the conductivity of the germanium just beneath the collector point, amplifying the output current that flowed to it from the base.