On December 16, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, two Bell Labs researchers, built the world’s first transistor.

Their device, called a point contract transistor, conducted electricity and amplified signals, a job then currently handled by bulky and delicate vacuum tubes and other components.

Their colleague William Shockley followed soon after with junction transistors. Although Bardeen and Brattain were first, Shockley’s device became the basis for a scientific and industrial juggernaut.

“It is the seminal device in terms of the way we think about information, and information is everything, from the music we listen to (to) the TV we watch,” Intel CTO Justin Rattner said. “Modern communications is all based on theories of information, not on how many megawatts we can pump into the antenna. It is how clever we can be finding those few faint signals and putting them to use, which is a computing problem.”

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