Is This The Most Manufactured Thing In Human History?

Your phone holds billions of copies of one tiny switch. Its inventors' own employer put it on a shelf. In 1959, at Bell Labs, a mechanical engineer from Egypt named Mohamed Atalla and a young Korean physicist named Dawon Kahng built the first working MOSFET, the metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor. Bell Labs decided it was too slow for the telephone network and did not pursue it. Today more than 99 percent of all microchips are built from it, and by one estimate about 13 sextillion have been made. This is the story of the MOSFET. It starts with a 1925 patent that nobody could build, runs through a furnace fire at Bell Labs, and ends inside the device you are holding right now. In this documentary: Why transistors in the 1950s drifted and had to be tested one by one Lilienfeld's 1925 patent and why nobody could build it for 35 years Why William Shockley's field effect transistor failed in 1945 The furnace fire in 1955 that created the missing layer of glass How Mohamed Atalla fixed the silicon surface Why Bell Labs called the first MOSFET too slow "You have no career to kill": how RCA and Fairchild picked it up How Dawon Kahng's floating gate led to flash memory How Atalla went on to protect the PIN at your ATM Had you heard the names Atalla and Kahng before today? Tell me in the comments. And if I got a date, a number or a name wrong, tell me there too. I read every comment and I pin corrections. Parts That Changed History tells the stories behind the chips, machines and software that shaped the modern world, and the people who built them. Subscribe for a new story every day. #MOSFET #Transistor #BellLabs #Semiconductor #ComputerHistory #ElectronicsHistory #TechHistory #Microchip #Engineering #Electronics #Silicon #History #Documentary #PartsThatChangedHistory