Transistors

 

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 20^th Century that had a greater impact on our lives.

Star Liner