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Transistor
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Courtesy of Grolier Educational
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Before the transistor was invented, electronic equipment was unreliable and cumbersome. The main reason for this were devices called “valves”, which were vacuum tubes used to turn the electric current on and off. Valves were large, unreliable and tended to heat up. A computer needed thousands of valves, which forced it to take room proportions. In 1947, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley created the transistor- a small reliable device that has gotten so tiny that today it is invisible to the human eye. Transistors shrunk the cumbersome size of many electrical appliances and allowed the production of laptops and other portable electronics. The "transistor team" was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics for their breakthrough.
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