The Most Important Invention of the 20th Century: Transistors

electronic communication the ability to send a message across vast distances virtually instantaneously transformed human culture some people consider Samuel Finley Brees Morse an American inventor to be the father of electronic communication with the invention of the Telegraph and to give just a brief example of how powerful that communication would be some people argue today that the timing of that invention played a critical role in the timing of the American Civil War the argument is that instantaneous communication or the fact that speech is given by different people across the country could be sent by telegraph and printed in newspapers the next day started to break down trust between frack factions and break down the alliances that had prevented disagreements from turning into fractures the argument isn't that the telegraph caused the Civil War the argument is that the telegraph broke down the system that head to that point prevented the Civil War and if that were the case it would have been profoundly disappointing to Sam to Morris who considered himself very much opposed to factionalism he called himself an American who knew neither North nor South nor East nor West but considered everyone in the United States to be a fellow countryman still you can't say that Samuel FB Morse did not recognize the potential of his invention as he said in one of the very first Telegraph's ever sent on May 24th 1844 what hath God wrought electronic communication today the technological descendants of Morse's Telegraph rule the world more than ever before and December 23rd represents an important date in the development of that technology in fact some people argue that a small demonstration in Bell Laboratories on December 23rd 1947 is one of the single most important events in human history and the the developments that took us to that seminal date deserve to be remembered Samuel Morse and the Telegraph for a prime example of the powerful effect that invention can have on history and this is even more clear if you understand his specific role in one of the key advancements of the modern age Morse was not the first to recognize that an open and closed circuit could be used for communication it wasn't even the first to build one there are several inventors have been claimed to have invented the Telegraph ahead of Samuel Morse but Morse with a couple of collaborators made two vital contributions that gave him claim to the title as the father of electronic communication first with the help of chemistry professor Leonard Gail he invented the relay the relay addresses a fundamental problem with electronic communication that the signal degrades with distance that limit meant that Telegraph's were limited to a fairly short range not devices that could communicate around the world the solution that Morse and Gale designed the relay works as a repeater they refresh the signal coming in from one circuit by transmitting it on another relay is not much changed are still used in many settings today secondly working with machinist Alfred Bale Morse developed Morse code the ability to use simple open and closed circuits and just two signals a dot and a dash to communicate language thus making the Telegraph a practical means of communication these two developments the ability to amplify a signal said it can be heard and the ability to turn the simplest electronic signal into communication weren't just keys to making a practical Telegraph they were keys to the development of the modern world as with the development of telegraphy the development of wireless telegraphy can be attributed to many inventors notably we all know Marconi mikuni developed the first practical operating radio transmitters and receivers in 1894 and was it will make great strides in the effective distance of wireless telegraphy through his understanding of antennas defined in Marconi's law but Marconi's radios had significant limits the receiver was only powered by the power that reached the antenna thus antennas had to be massive and transmitters had to use huge amounts of power and still no matter the antenna the signal was weak a Marconi radio required headsets to here and the receiver only heard dots and dashes using Morse code while wireless telegraphy had important applications particularly the ability to transmit to ships at sea where I was telling her if you'd lacked a critical component it did not have a version of Morse's relay to truly change the world it needed amplification like telegraphy the answer to the problem of occasion can be attributed to many inventors but the one most commonly attributed with the key invention was lee deforest the forced contribution was the invention of the Audion which was the first triode in 1906 interestingly the force did not invent the Audion with the idea of amplification it was built as a radio receiver the Audion uses a vacuum tube although de forests early audience still have residual gas in the tube the Audion included three electrodes or electrical conductors a heated filament a grid and a plate the gas in the tube would be heated creating electrical current that was affected by radio waves when the tube was subjected to radio waves those would close a circuit which could be heard via headphones well the force had invented a new form of radio receiver which we could market without patent disputes he did not at the time realize its most important potential the Audion produced gain since headphones could be hooked to a battery the Audion did not like other receivers retighten rely entirely on the power that reached the antenna from the transmitter the Audion could use a lower power radio wave to direct a higher power stream of electricity the signal was amplified that meant that a signal from a weak transmitter could be heard over a much greater distance well it took time before researchers really understood the amplifying effect of the Audion tube its impact was enormous in brief the heated filament creates electrons through a process called thermionic emission the electrons move freely through the near vacuum of the tube and this creates a current between the cathode which creates the stream of electrons and the metal plate the positively charged anode that attracts the electrons the third electrode is the low power varying signal that acts like a gate across the stream it's negatively charged it repels some electrons possibly be charged and attracts them so the low-power charged controls the more powerful stream of electrons in exact proportion this means a small signal could be made much louder the tubes could amplify both the transmitter and a receiver and meant that radio waves were no longer limited entirely by how much power reached an antenna and can amplify Sigma B on dots and dashes the forest' invention of the Audion tube and the field of electronics the physics engineering technology and application that deals with the emission flow and control of electrons in both vacuums and matter the eventual applications far exceeded that recognized by the forest at the time trends could serve as a repeater amplifier for telephones much like Morse's repeater but transmitting the full range of voice making long-distance telephone a possible previously telephones were limited in range to about 800 miles the trail allowed radio to broadcast full sound not just dots and dashes and loudly enough that could be heard without headphones allowing a radio that a family could sit around and hear radio went from a simple message system to a medium of mass communication after Atlantic telephone and telegraph purchased DeForest patents in 1913 the tubes are developed to create Public Address systems sound recording systems and then synchronized sound systems for motion pictures allowing talkies these systems massively impacted culture and history they allowed a truly mass medium that unlike print did not require libera C was freed from physical boundaries of delivery person can now receive mass media content while doing other work music and entertainment were transformed an entire genre of music o their existence to the radio that was allowed by F fine tubes people became more involved in news and events of the day develop more meaningful relationships with their political leaders whose voices and faces now became familiar in many ways the most powerful leaders of the twentieth century people like Franklin Roosevelt Winston Churchill and of course Adolf Hitler were creatures of the era of electronic amplification but applications for these amplifying tubes went beyond communication the first computers machines that can be instructed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations were mechanical these computers used discs years or pulleys and the calculations were derived from the mechanical process such computers go back to antiquity for example the abacus a calculating device that may date back more than 4,000 years mechanical computers capable more complex mathematical calculations that could be programmed for example English mathematician Charles Babbage's Difference Engine were developed in the 19th century the Tanna computers were enhanced by early electronics using electrical relays to turn the mechanical levers increase speed and decrease size creating marvels like the US Navy's torpedo data computer used on Second World War submarines in which to do advanced trigonometrical calculations needed to determine torpedo firing solutions in fact what many considered to be the first modern computer the z3 built by German inventor Konrad Zuse I in 1941 was electromechanical Zeus's machine used telephone relays it was the first to define a code based on a switch being turned off and on rather than purely mechanical aspects like gear sizes thus making it a digital as opposed to the earlier analog computers thus Samuel Morse's relay became the basis for the language used to program virtually all digital computers binary the use of just two signals just like the Telegraph's dot and dash to create an infinitely complex message if you understand how the telephone relays worked in zoos as III and how the Audion tube by DeForest worked then you see the potential a triode essentially is a device where one electrode sends a message to two other electrodes which allows you to send a binary message without the need for the mechanical switch electronically at the speed of light the first computer would use vacuum tubes for the logic circuitry was invented at Iowa State University in 1939 but it had limited purpose it was built not to be programmable but to solve a set of linear equations another early example of so-called first generation or vacuum tube computers was the colossus machines built between 1943 and 1945 and used by British intelligence to do the mathematical calculations that allowed code breakers to parse through the huge number of potential settings on a German Enigma code machine there eventually ten Colossus machines with the earliest using some 1500 vacuum tubes machines and their essential role in breaking the German code materially affected the outcome of the Second World War further developments included the u.s. built electronic numerical integrator and computer or ENIAC capable of solving a large class of numerical programs through programming completed in 1945 ENIAC you some 20,000 vacuum tubes was a thousand times faster than electromechanical computers but vacuum tubes are of course relatively large and fragile tubes take time to warm up and require large amounts of electrical energy and thus produce large amounts of heat despite being marbles of their age they require large rooms to be able to do what by today's standards were very few calculations which is how we get to the importance of December 23rd in 1923 Polish American inventor Julius lowenfeld patented a method and apparatus for controlling electric current the idea was a solid-state device that used an electric field control the flow of current using semi conductive materials semi conductive materials are materials whose electrical conductivity sits in between the conductor and an insulator for such materials a resistance falls as their temperature rises since the electrical properties of these materials can be affected by an electrical field that could work both as an amplifier and as a switch much like de forests Audion tubes but they would be smaller less fragile and require smaller amounts of energy despite the promise of his idea the quality and purity of the available semiconductors at the time was insufficient for Lille and fell to produce a working version and the patent went largely unnoticed following the Second World War Bell Labs in Manhattan formed a group dedicated to finding a solid-state alternative to the vacuum tube like lemon field they had trouble producing a working version till they came upon the idea of working with the semiconductors surface state rather than an external electrical field in 1947 the team of physicists John Bardeen Walter Brattain and William Shockley managed to create a working device that used to foil leads to disrupt the surface state across the semiconductor germanium a small charge in one gold lead would change the resistance of the germanium changing the electron flow in fact the charge in the second contact was larger than the change in the first thus the device operated as an amplifier another team member John Robinson Pierce for the new device as vacuum-tube provide on transconductance the new device worked by trans resistance a device that used trans resistance was us called a transistor they first demonstrated the working device to colleagues on December 23rd 1947 and that date has become enshrined as the birthday of the transistor the magazine computer world described the importance of this date the transistor they argued in 2007 is the most important invention of the 20th century civil engineer Trevor English was more direct calling the transistor the world's most important thing for their discovery Shockley Bardeen and Brattain were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics it's not just the nature of transistors amplifiers that make things like radios televisions and cell phones small enough to hold and switches that allow for more processes in far less space with far less energy than the vacuum tubes that preceded them it is also how quickly the technology has been able to advance after several developments Bell Labs engineers Mohammed la and dawan Khan developed the metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor otherwise known as the moss or MOSFET the device was the first truly scalable transistor it could be easily manufactured placed in an integrated circuit essentially many tiny transistors stamped onto a single sheet of semi conductive material the MOSFET is included in virtually all modern electronics billions are manufactured every day an estimated 13 six Tilian were manufactured between 1960 and 2018 it is the single most frequently manufactured device in human history the evolution of transistor technology has been astounding in 1965 gordon moore a founder of Intel noted that the number of transistors per square inch on an integrated circuit doubled every year since their invention he predicted the trend would continue and it has to this day the astounding trend is now called Moore's law how do you encapsulate the importance of a technology that has transformed nearly every field of human industry how do you account for the lives saved by the medical advances that it's allowed the lives enriched by the increased availability and reliability of transportation that it caused that the impact on science and technology of the huge ability to aggregate and access information the virtual shrinking of the world through electronic communication how do you quantify the importance of a technology that allowed us to go to the moon with a guidance computer that had only some 32,000 bits of RAM one millionth of what is on a modern cell phone how can you express the importance of a technology that takes the computational power of the Colossus that helped to win the second world war and places it on the point not the head the point of a pin and like Morse's Telegraph well all that bring us together or what tear us apart how do you talk about the importance of the technology whose anniversary we celebrate on December 23rd I don't have the words for it I can only echo those of Samuel Morse what hath God wrought I hope you enjoyed this episode of the history guy short snippets of forgotten history between 10 and 15 minutes long and if you did enjoy please go ahead and click that thumbs up button if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for future episodes please write those in the comment section I will be happy to personally respond be sure to follow the history guy on Facebook Instagram Twitter and check out our 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Channel: The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

Views: 586,939

Keywords: history, the history guy, computers, transistors, history of science, invention, history guy

Id: OuFlISa73Sw

Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 23 2019

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