I can remember when the transistor radio was the coolest
tech device on the planet. I did not know what a transistor was. I just knew
that I could have a radio that I could carry along with me. Prior to the
transistor, radios, TVs, and computers had vacuum tubes. They were appliances
that were large and had to be plugged into the wall. When you turned the device
on, you had to wait a minute for the tubes to warm up. If you looked into the
ventilation slits you could actually see the glow from the filaments in the
vacuum tubes as they warmed up, exactly like the filaments in a light bulb,
except they took longer to start glowing. When the radio or TV had been on for
a while you could feel the heat coming off it. You could even see the heat shimmer.
But the main problem for the old tube radios was that they were fixed in place.
The new transistor radios encapsulated a new word “portable.”
The old devices were heavy and produced a lot of heat, a
lot of waste heat. That is wasted energy. Vacuum tubes also had a fairly short
shelf-life before they burned out. I remember grocery stores or drug stores
that had tube testers so you could check to see which ones were good. They
would sell you new ones at the same store. I used to see these tube tester
devices and think they were cool. I wanted to see them in action. But my dad
never used one, at least while I was with him. That is probably because while I
was in my early formative childhood, vacuum tubes were already on their way
out.
Soon transistor radios were cheap and ubiquitous. It wasn’t
long before whenever my friends and I were doing something, one of us always
had a radio along. We had our tunes with us. We could be playing in the
backyard or in the street or at the ballfield accompanied to music. We were in
tune with the times in a way that we had not been before. As the transistor
revolution made its way through the 60’s and 70’s, electronic devices became
smaller and smaller. The ENIAC computer of 1946 required 17,000 to 18,000 vacuum
tubes and tube failures were frequent. The ENIAC took up an entire room and
could do less than your modern hand-held calculator. As semiconductor
technology has improved, transistors have gotten smaller and smaller. The
microchips in your computers and phones are tiny packages of millions of transistors.
I kind of have an affection for vacuum tubes. They were
cool devices in their day. But it’s kind of like I have an affection for
hand-pumps. They are intrinsically kind of neat, but I wouldn’t want to go back
to the days of having to pump my own water for everything.
In 1956, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to William
Bradford Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain "for their
research on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect."
I can’t think of another invention in the 20th Century that had a
greater impact on our lives.
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