Happy birthday, transistor The transistor, the ubiquitous building block of all electronic circuits, will be 65 years old on Sunday. The device is jointly credited to William Shockley (1910-1989), John Bardeen (1908-1991) and Walter Brattain (1902-1987), and it was Bardeen and Brattain who operated the first working point-contact transistor during an experiment conducted on 16 December 1947. Yet this now ubiquitous device -- these days more as an element in silicon chip design than as a discrete component -- has a history that goes back to the mid-1920s.
