John Bardeen 

Early Life 

John Bardeen's early life was filled with success and tragedy, at age 12 he had emotional loss, as his mother had died of cancer. But he was determined and he graduated high school at age 15 and went in to go to collage at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Working to become an electrical engineer. After college he went to various universities and laboratories to work and research various subjects some of which he would use some of what he learned in the development of the transistor and later his theory of superconductivity. Some like Princeton Universitygave him vast experiance in his field and strengthen his knowledge in semiconductors. After World War II he joined bell telephone labs which would lead him to the reasearch in a better semiconductor device for computers.

The Transistor

This is where William Shockley, Walter Brattain, John Bardeen where tasked by Bell telephone labs to work on making a semiconductor device that would replace vacuum tubes. Starting in 1945 they would work for two years experimenting and trying different models and combinations of different metals and materials. But it wouldn’t be until the winter of 1947 that the first transistor was made. After many failures the team was discouraged and there leader had left them to go home. While he was gone John Bardeen had a historic insight that allowed him to create the fist transitrer. This was the Point Contact Transistor. John Bardeen relized that what was known about how electrons worked in crystals was wrong so he built a device that would break the rules. It was made of strips of gold foil on a plastic triangle, pushed down into contact with a slab of germanium. This would allow electrons to break through the surface of the material making signals go through the device. Scockley was furious that he had not seen the device he helped make sucsessfully work so he made a better one based on Bardeens creation. In the end the all they got the patent for the device but at the time there was little press or popularity. 

Then tensions arose and the team split up including eight others who where associated with the project but John Bardeen has laid down the basics to how a transistor would work. Almost a decade later in 1956 they had won the Nobel Prize in physics this would reunite the team and give them all credit for the transistor. After the invention he continued teaching and university’s and researching other topics. The university of Illinois told us that he was well accomplished in that university and has a square in his honor.