Abstract :
Under the above headline in the Bell Laboratories Record for December 1972, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley, joint winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956, recall the events leading up to the invention of the transistor in 1948 and comment on its effects. Morgan Sparks, who built the first junction transistor and has subsequently directed semiconductor work at Bell Laboratories, also reflects on `25 years of transistors¿, and quotations from contemporary papers by some of the other workers concerned with the more significant of subsequent developments go to make a fitting commemorative issue.
