First Transistor

A tiny device that launched the digital age/Inventions & Discoveries

The first working transistor was demonstrated at Bell Labs on December 23, 1947, by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. This point-contact transistor was about 1.3 cm tall and sat on a small germanium crystal slab. It could amplify electrical signals by a factor of about 100. Today, a single modern chip contains billions of transistors, but this original one took two physicists and a lab bench to operate.