Промышленный патент США 124

Transistor Was the Best. So Why Did It Fail? In December 1947, two physicists at Bell Labs coaxed a sliver of germanium into amplifying a signal, and the vacuum tube era started running out of time. The device they built won the Nobel Prize in 1956. It was faster than anything before it, cheap enough to put a radio in a shirt pocket, and rugged enough to fly on America's first satellites. Through most of the 1960s it had no serious rival. By every measure engineers used at the time, it was simply the best one. Twelve years after that first demonstration, two men working inside the same organization built something else. It was slower. It leaked. It failed in ways nobody could account for. Bell Labs looked at the results and decided the work did not justify the resources. One of the two men was gone from the company within three years. The device was set aside. Nearly every transistor manufactured since has been that device, and not the one that won the prize. How the better technology lost, and why the men who found its replacement got so little for it, is a harder question than the usual telling allows. If you built with germanium, if your parts drawer still has a row of 2N3055s in it, or if you spent a career on a bench where none of this was history yet — this one is for you.