ABSTRACT
On December 23, 1947, electrical engineer John Bardeen and physicist Walter Brattain demonstrated their newly invented solid-state amplification and switching device, the transistor, to their superiors at Bell Labs. Since the development of the first triodes, invented by Lee De Forest in 1906 but not perfected and put to general use until around 1912, electrical amplification had been achieved through use of the vacuum tube, in which a current is passed through a vacuum-sealed glass cylinder containing a coil from a negatively charged anode to a positively charged cathode. 1 In 1918, British physicists William Eccles and F.W. Jordan created the first electronic flip-flop using vacuum tube triodes, which could transmit information in the binary language of 1’s and 0’s as the current in individual tubes switched on and off. In 1932, another British physicist named Charles Wynn-Williams developed an electronic counter using vacuum tubes. Similar switching and counting devices carried instructions and facilitated mathematical calculations for computers from Colossus to Whirlwind.
