The Idea Factory: Bell Labs And The Great Age Of American Innovation (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
Usually an understanding of the device took time, since there were no tangible products—no proof—to demonstrate how it might someday alter technology or culture. But a few people could see it right away. The tiny device, its three wires peeking out, was sitting on the desk of Bill Shockley one day when a guest stopped in the midst of their conversation and asked what it was. “It’s a solid-state amplifier,” Shockley told his visitor. It worked like a vacuum tube, he added.1 The visitor, a rail-thin mathematician in his early thirties who was known at Bell Labs as something of a loner, listened closely. He had a gaunt face and clear gray eyes; often he gave others the impression, always unspoken, that he was amused by whatever was being said. Very few things impressed him. But he would later explain that he immediately saw the import of what Shockley was saying. It mattered little that he was looking at the transistor in its earliest incarnation, before it was manufactured, before it even had a name.
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