The transistor: 50 glorious years and where we are going

Toward the end of 1945, as the second world war drew to a close, United States corporate leadership began thinking of refocusing research from the frantic war effort toward products needed by a post-war economy. Bell Laboratories management anticipated a rapid expansion of communications in the post-war era. However, they also saw several areas of major concern that would pose serious limitations on future telecommunications systems. Near the top of Mervin Kelly´s list of limitations was the slow speed of the electro-mechanical relays and the high power dissipation and poor reliability of vacuum-tube amplifiers. Kelly, the Bell Labs Director of Research, established a group in the summer of 1945 to focus on understanding semiconductors. By January of 1946, the group was fully in place. Stanley Morgan and William Shockley were group leaders. The balance of the team consisted of John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, Bob Gibney, Bert Moore and Gerald Pearson.