1.           Bell Laboratories, one of world's largest industrial laboratories and the research arm of American Telephone & Telegraph (AT &T) , was beginning in 1945 to look for a solution of a long standing problem - competition from the expiry of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patents and the need for new initiatives. While transcontinental telephone service was identified as the alternate strategy, the right technology was not available. Bell purchased a patent for vacuum tube from Lee De Forest and improved it very significantly; and yet the tubes were unreliable and produced too much heat.The laboratory director Mervin Kelly felt that the answer " might lie in a strange class of materials called semiconductors". He put together a team headed by a young brilliant theoretician Bill Shockley to take up the project using some of the advances in semiconductor research during the war that made radar possible. Shockley in turn drafted Walter Brattain of Bell , an outstanding experimentalist, and John Bardeen , a theoretical physicist of University of Minnesota. So also a mix of physicists, chemists and engineers. In 1945 Shockley designed the first semiconductor amplifier based on the "field effect" , but it did not work.Bardeen and Brattain were asked to find out why it did not work. This led to the experiments with gold on germanium by Brattain. Finally on December 16,1947, Bardeen and Brattain built the point contact transistor made from strips of gold foil on a plastic triangle pushed down into contact with a slab of germanium. Shockley eventually prepared the junction (sandwitch) transistor which was more robust and more practical and easier to manufacture. This became the central artifact of the electronic age. Reportedly there arose considerable acrimony between the three as to whose names be put on the patent for the device and also be featured on publicity matter, etc. Bell Labs unveiled the invention on June 30,1948 , settling the name as "transistor" - combining the ideas of "trans-resistance" with the names of devices such as thermistors and results were made public through two patents assigned to the Bell Labs : 

"Three- Electrode Circuit Element Utilising Semiconductive Materials" 

US Patent No 2,524,035 dated June 17,1948 , John Bardeen , Summit and Walter H.Brittain. 

" Semiconductor Amplifier" US Patent No 2,502,488 dated September 24,1948, William Shockley. 

3.           Importantly enough, the invention got little attention in the press or industry. Shockley however saw its potential and founded a company, Shockley Semiconductor in Palo Alto.Those who left him eventually started Fairchild Semiconcuctor and Intel (co-inventor of integrated circuit along with Texas Instruments). 

4.           Even though Bardeen,Brattain and Shockley earned very little money, Shockley's company pioneered the beginning of the Silicon Valley. And for their pioneering discovery of the transistor ,the three of them shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for physics and their patents inducted in 1974 to the Hall of Fame of USA.. 

5.           Interestingly enough, in the 1950s and 1960s, most US companies chose to focus their attention on the military market in producing transistor products. That left the door wide open for the Japanese engineers Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita to mass produce through Sony Electronics tiny transistorized radios through their abilities to mass produce transistors. 

6.           The transistor is probably the most important invention of the twentieth century in the sense there is no sector now which is not affected by microelectronic devices. The future generation will always bow its head in adoration before the memory of these three great heroes of modern science.