[HN Gopher] Who invented the transistor?
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Who invented the transistor?
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 56 points
Date : 2025-12-31 12:12 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (people.idsia.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (people.idsia.ch)
| dboreham wrote:
| This is a good piece of writing that nicely illustrates how what
| we perceive as "who invented something" is mostly a function of
| money and politics.
| twoodfin wrote:
| If we're talking about invention rather than discovery, who
| created the inflection point between potential and actual use
| seems relevant if not dispositive.
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| Yeah, it's all about the inflection point. Otherwise how are
| you even dispositive?
| ur-whale wrote:
| I wish Jurgen Schmidhuber would switch back to actually doing AI
| research instead of having become completely obsessed with "who
| invented what" because he feels like he has somehow been
| academically "robbed" at some point in his career.
|
| He's now officially become a full-blown pariah in the AI world,
| most relevant people in the space running away at the first sight
| of his goatee at conferences, knowing exactly the kind of
| complete and utter crank he's become.
| LatencyKills wrote:
| Was anything he claimed in the article incorrect? Personally, I
| enjoy these types of historical stories.
| ur-whale wrote:
| I'm not criticizing the article at all.
|
| In fact I am generally ignorant on the topic of who invented
| the transistor, nor do I in general particularly care about
| who invented what.
|
| The quest for academic fame is something I've always utterly
| failed to understand.
|
| And, if it the author was anyone but JS I'd not have said
| anything.
|
| What honks me off about this guy though is to see a someone
| who did in fact do early impactful work on recurrent neural
| networks believe that:
|
| a) that automatically gives him some sort of special status
| wrt the rest of humanity
|
| b) because he didn't get the recognition he believes he is
| due, has completely stopped doing anything useful in the
| field, turning instead into an absolute crank that every one
| in the AI field makes fun of, and with a holy mission to
| rewrite history to assign credit where credit is due
| everywhere he believes there was an injustice.
|
| c) every time I see someone with an exceptionally well-
| working brain waste their time because of ego or sheer
| stubbornness on shite like this instead of using it to do
| more interesting work, it makes me very sad.
|
| Schmidhuber is a textbook example of this, and the other
| perfect example of this is Chomsky, a very smart man, who
| basically - because of his oversized ego and profound
| stubbornness - ended up wasting his entire life energy
| working on a linguistic dead-end _AND_ a political philosophy
| dead-end.
|
| I have a real hard time understanding how the brain of that
| kind of folks operates, being so bright on certain axes and
| totally and utterly dumb on others, especially the total lack
| of self-awareness.
| random3 wrote:
| I'll just leave this here
| https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gLnCTgIAAAAJ&hl=en so
| maybe you realize that's a bit of a tall claim from a random
| about one of the top researchers in AI, no matter what their
| opinions are. Perhaps you should look up what a "crank"
| actually is before labeling researchers, just because they
| don't match your religion.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Your link did not work for me. "We're sorry...but your
| computer or network may be sending automated queries."
| esafak wrote:
| It's his Google Scholar profile; you can search for it.
| random3 wrote:
| It's Juergen Schmidhuber's Google Scholar page
| ur-whale wrote:
| Did I claim anywhere that his early work wad bad?
|
| Nope. The contrary as a matter of fact. But the facts are:
|
| 1) nothing worth talking about since the LSTMs
|
| 2) most of the reasons why he's been visible in the last 20
| years is because of shit like this (JS harassing Ian
| Goodfellow about attribution in the middle of a technical
| presentation. Watch the face of Ian, pretty symptomatic of
| when AI folks have to interact with JS these days).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJVyzd0rqdc&t=3778s
| jesuslop wrote:
| Wow that is super vitriolic, more if from a colleague. Sure the
| hehe debate is about if he is to be considered more or less
| accomplished, but going from non-success to pariah, what is the
| need?
| ur-whale wrote:
| > but going from non-success to pariah, what is the need?
|
| Not sure "need" is the appropriate word here.
|
| Grab anyone in who has worked on AI in the last 30 years, and
| pronounce the word "Schmidhuber" and watch the face of you
| interlocutor: you'll either get an eyroll or a smirk, but
| rarely a lively discussion on what he's "invented".
|
| Nothing vitriolic about describing reality.
| godelski wrote:
| > but rarely a lively discussion on what he's "invented".
|
| Go back a few years. You're biased by transformers. Before
| them everyone was talking about LSTMs. Not that that's the
| only thing he's done either
| peterfirefly wrote:
| He is usually insufferable (and misleading) when he talks about
| AI innovation priorities. This article is different, though. It
| really does seem like Lilienfeld invented the transistor first
| and should be given credit for that. It also really does look
| like the official inventors knew that and were somewhat
| dishonest.
|
| Funny, btw, that nobody here has mentioned that Lilienfeld also
| invented the electrolytic capacitor.
| jacquesm wrote:
| But: it's obvious why he wrote the article. It is to bolster
| his own claims, not to give Lilienfeld his due.
| Aloha wrote:
| I think a valid part of the question of who invented something is
| "who built the first working device" - describing something in
| theory and building working device are not the same thing.
|
| AG Bell wasn't the first one to conceptually invent the
| telephone, he was among the first (along with Elisha Gray) in
| making practical working telephone and later a practical working
| telephone system.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Theodore Maiman and the laser.
| summa_tech wrote:
| To some degree, this is a consequence of the nature of the
| field you're working in:
|
| * if the physics is so completely understood that you can
| confidently predict something will work from your sofa, and
| give an error-free recipe to build it, you indeed can invent
| from theory... but how deep can this invention be if the
| problems of the field are completely solved?
|
| * if you are working in a field at the edge of human
| understanding, you cannot have the confidence in your ideas
| without having tested them experimentally; a theoretician makes
| at most a minor contribution to the actual inventions being
| realized, because he's producing - most likely somewhat wrong -
| hypotheses.
|
| This latter kind of "theoretical" inventions are heavily
| subject to survivorship bias. Fifteen competent theoreticians
| make different predictions - all according to best, though
| incomplete, model of the world; a successful experiment
| validates exactly one of them, and we end up exalting the lucky
| winner as the "inventor".
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > how deep can this invention be if the problems of the field
| are completely solved?
|
| You're confusing depth with originality.
|
| A field may be very well understood, but also very deep.
| summa_tech wrote:
| In theory, that's true.
|
| In practice, any unexplored corner of the field will
| contain surprises; these will require extra theoretical
| development to cover.
|
| Usually things like imperfect understanding of materials
| get in the way. Pretty much the reason you need both theory
| and experiment to make progress in every single area of
| matter-based technology (i.e. not software).
| constantcrying wrote:
| That is correct, but the article explicitly addresses this
| point and argues that the evidence points to Lilienfeld
| producing a working transistor.
|
| "Later, some people claimed that Lilienfeld did not implement
| his ideas since "high-purity materials needed to make such
| devices work were decades away from being ready,"[CHLI] but the
| 1991 thesis by Bret Crawford offered evidence that "these
| claims are incorrect."[CRA91] Lilienfeld was an accomplished
| experimenter, and in 1995, Joel Ross[ROS95] "replicated the
| prescriptions of the same Lilienfeld patent. He was able to
| produce devices that remained stable for months."[ARN98] Also,
| in 1981, semiconductor physicist H. E. Stockman confirmed that
| "Lilienfeld demonstrated his remarkable tubeless radio receiver
| on many occasions".[EMM13]"
|
| For many things (computers, rocketry, aerospace, etc.) and
| different reasons, Germany in the years around the second world
| war, was a pretty bad place to get international credit for
| your accomplishments.
| kgwxd wrote:
| The only point in asking in the first place is pride and/or
| greed.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I had that thought too, describing that something might be
| physically possible isn't really inventing it, you have to
| build (and arguably sell) the device too. Re-organizing someone
| else's equations and saying it's technically possible is maybe
| enough to publish a paper but certainly doesn't rise to the
| standard of inventing in my mind
| kbr2000 wrote:
| "It was able to squeak, but not to speak. Experts and
| professors wrestled with it in vain. It refused to transmit one
| intelligible sentence." [0]
|
| "A translation of Legat's article on Reis' invention was
| obtained by Thomas Edison prior to his filing his patent
| application on a telephone in 1877. In correspondence of 1885,
| Edison credits Reis as having invented "the first telephone",
| with the limitation that it was "only musical not
| articulating"." [1]
|
| Fascinating stuff nonetheless, these inventors and their
| ideas... See also previous experimenters [2]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Philipp_Reis
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reis_telephone
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Philipp_Reis#Previous_e...
| Aloha wrote:
| Yeah - though Bell's first apparatus wasn't much better - the
| invention of the carbon microphone is what really what set
| the telephone on to being a practical device. The rest of it
| was trying to build a network to connect people - and that
| was really hard (and capital intensive).
| fragmede wrote:
| What blows my mind that we absolutely take for granted
| today is insulated wires. The technology and supply chain
| to mine or to find into metal and also to farm cotton and
| wool and formed that into protective tubing before the
| advent of plastic insulation. The amount of technology that
| goes into making a "simple" USB-cable beggars belief if you
| stop to think about it. Even a simple #2 wooden pencil with
| an eraser on top is beyond the knowledge of one person to
| produce, nevermind a USB-c cable!
| delaminator wrote:
| In Victorian London, electricity was distributed around
| the home using bare wires with an air gap. It was 32v
| though.
|
| Later it was superseded with lead wrapped in paper, until
| the Knob and Tube system. This comprised of single-
| insulated copper conductors installed within walls and
| ceilings, this wiring was encased in porcelain insulating
| tubes with cloth-lined sleeves.
|
| One knob for Live and one knob for Neutral. The wires
| were held in place by porcelain knobs nailed to the house
| frame. Where wires passed through wood framing, they were
| threaded through porcelain tubes to prevent them from
| contacting the wood.
| lisper wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knob-and-tube_wiring
| jacquesm wrote:
| I found some of that in a very old farmhouse. It looked
| like a very good way of setting fire to a structure.
| ipcress_file wrote:
| My house once had knob and tube wiring. Over the past 15
| years I have replaced most of what I assume is the
| second-generation cloth-covered wiring (which dates back
| to the 40s, 50s, and 60s). Every once in a while, I come
| across the insulators from an older electrical system,
| but most of the wire that went with those insulators was
| pulled out long ago. The only remains are short bits of
| wire that were wrapped around the insulators.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I have a cable here that is interesting. When I first saw
| it I thought how strange, a cable that is multi-stranded
| bare wire for this application (connecting a camera).
| Then I looked at it under a microscope and realized not
| only is it insulated wire, it is _shielded_ wire.
| Mindblowing. I pity the people that have to handle that
| stuff.
|
| https://down-
| ph.img.susercontent.com/file/sg-11134201-7repx-...
| Aloha wrote:
| Well, and the first really 50 years of telephony - you
| were probably as likely to have an uninsulated line as an
| insulated one.
|
| Remember that the first telephones were 1-wire with a
| ground return, and that configuration was quite common
| until the early 40's.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| There's something to be said that mass production is another
| distinct stage of invention. Karl Benz may have invented the
| first internal combustion engine car, and plenty more built
| cars by hand for the rich, but Henry Ford made cars anyone
| could have for cheap.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I agree with that. It is a bit like the idea that having an
| idea for a startup is less important than the ability to get
| it to a level where investors might be interested.
|
| A while ago there was an artical posted here about all the
| world changing inventions that came out of Bell Labs. It was
| easy to show for most of them that they weren't the actual
| inventor, and in many cases not even the first producer. They
| were the first to make it practical for mass production,
| however.
| jacquesm wrote:
| So, who invented the Satellite then? What about the steam
| engine? The helicopter?
|
| Sometimes the inventors are so far ahead of their time that the
| materials science first has to catch up (in some cases only a
| few millenia) before they can realize their devices.
| Effectively it is then the first person _after_ whoever did the
| materials science part to create the device that gets to claim
| the invention.
|
| So we get Sikorski, and not Da Vinci.
|
| We get Arthur C. Clarke who claims the 'communications
| satellite' even though the moon was there all along and the
| Sputnik was the first working very crude device (it was one way
| only, it said 'you lost the space race' in a single bit of
| message).
|
| We get Newcomen, Jeronimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (I had to look
| that up, I can never remember the man's full name), and Hero of
| Alexandria competing for the steam engine title, with all of
| them holding some part of the credit.
|
| Pointing at an inventor is hard, and 'who built the first
| working device' is one way of doing this but it assumes a
| singular effort whereas most things are team efforts and misses
| the bit that the idea itself can be an instrumental step in
| getting your 'true' inventor to make their claim, standing on
| the shoulders of the giants before them. In isolation, we all
| probably would invent the hammer in our lifetimes, if that.
| lisper wrote:
| > Newcomen, Jeronimo de Ayanz y Beaumont ... and Hero of
| Alexandria
|
| Thomas Savery too:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Savery
| jacquesm wrote:
| Ah yes, and a better claim than some (there are quite a few
| more).
|
| I always wondered what the effect of these in absolute time
| is. Consider: if someone had come up with a viable steam
| engine in the year 1000 or so, how would that have change
| the course of history?
| lisper wrote:
| I remember reading an analysis of that a while back but I
| can't remember where I saw it. The upshot was that the
| industrial revolution turned on more than just
| innovation, it also required just the right combination
| of natural resources (coal) and economic conditionsL
| deforestation in England driving the use of coal for
| heat, which drove mining, which drove the need for pumps,
| which made Savery's engine economically viable. Before
| that steam power would not have found an application.
|
| Also, the piston and cylinder (which came later) were
| derived from canon-making technology, so that had to come
| first too.
| deepnotderp wrote:
| > t also required just the right combination of natural
| resources (coal) and economic conditionsL deforestation
|
| This argument is repeated often, but I don't think it's
| really true. Both Savery and Newcomen's engines were
| initially aimed at evacuating flooded metal mines and not
| coal mines.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Probably https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-
| no-roman-indus... HN discussion
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187 (509 points
| | Aug 2022 | 519 comments)
| grunder_advice wrote:
| I personally detest the way we sanctify some sole individuals
| while forgetting the bulk of the community. I don't care who
| published the first patent for the transistor. He or She
| certainly cannot be credited for all the work that has been put
| into it so that I can today use a hand held device to post this
| comment.
| random3 wrote:
| I see where you're coming from, but while that's the case with
| most stuff ("normal science") , it often isn't the case for
| truly revolutionary stuff. Many breakthroughs happen not
| because of the bulk of the community, but against it, often at
| the highest cost for the individuals.
| godelski wrote:
| Surprisingly also not true. Yes, people go against the grain
| and it is required to actually make paradigm shifts but
| they're never alone nor did they build from scratch. It may
| be few against many but it is almost never one against all.
| That one only prevails due to support from others. Those
| names don't shine but it doesn't mean they weren't critical
| to the advancement of a field
| random3 wrote:
| Strong claims - maybe good time to do some homework instead
| of arguing without evidence?
|
| Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for heresy. Boltzmann
| died by suicide after lack of acceptance by the scientific
| community. It's a very long list and something that's been
| studied, actually.
| godelski wrote:
| You do realize Galileo and Kepler were around at the same
| time, right? Galileo is the best example of what I
| claimed.
|
| You criticize me for "not doing my homework" yet you
| haven't heard of Castelli[0]? He's even in the fucking
| Wiki article on Galileo lol[1] >
| Boltzmann died by suicide after lack of acceptance by the
| scientific community.
|
| Your knowledge of Boltzmann seems to be as deep as your
| knowledge of Galileo. > It's a very long
| list and something that's been studied, actually.
|
| You're absolutely right. You should read some of it. Or
| if you don't like reading I do highly recommend _An
| Opinionated History of Mathematics_ [2]. Blasjo even has
| a whole season dedicated to Galileo.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedetto_Castelli
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controv
| ersy_ov...
|
| [2] https://www.podbean.com/podcast-
| detail/85etf-7ecf8/Opinionat...
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| "It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam
| engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or
| any other important thing--and the last man gets the credit
| and we forget the others. He added his little mite -- that is
| all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-
| nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are
| plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us
| modest. But nothing can do that."
|
| -- Mark Twain
| godelski wrote:
| We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Giants who are just a
| bunch of people in a trench coat
| jesuslop wrote:
| This is understandable, but maybe you cannot offer an
| alternative to just give credit nobody. Schmidhuber is playing
| the game by its rules being self-consciously contrarian
| enjoying himself, while offering an interesting historic pinch
| of retrospective justice.
| rongenre wrote:
| @book{Kuhn1962, author = {Kuhn, Thomas S.},
| title = {The Structure of Scientific Revolutions},
| publisher = {University of Chicago Press}, year =
| {1962}, address = {Chicago}, note =
| {Often cited with various editions, e.g., 50th ed. 2012},
| keywords = {paradigm shift, normal science, scientific
| revolutions} }
| Isamu wrote:
| What's up with the ending that makes no sense?
|
| >Where are the physical limits? According to Bremermann (1982), a
| computer of 1 kg of mass and 1 liter of volume can execute at
| most 1051 operations per second on at most 1032 bits. The trend
| above will hit the Bremermann limit roughly 25 decades after Z3,
| circa 2200. However, since there are only 2 x 1030 kg of mass in
| the solar system, the trend is bound to break within a few
| centuries, since the speed of light will greatly limit the
| acquisition of additional mass
|
| They shift from talking about the transistor density to somehow
| considering a supermassive construct. Reminds me of LLM mashups.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| It seems to refer to the previous paragraph:
|
| > The naive extrapolation of this exponential trend predicts
| that the 21st century will see cheap computers with a thousand
| times the raw computational power of all human brains combined
|
| i.e. putting an upper bound on the exponential with solar
| system mass
| observationist wrote:
| It's a natural extension of the ideas being discussed - the
| limit in computation per gram of mass has energetic bounds, as
| well, with configurations nearing the upper limit that start
| looking more like nuclear explosions than anything we'd regard
| as structured computation. The extremes are amazing to consider
| - things that look and act like stars, but are fantastically
| precise Turing machines, and so on.
|
| It's a theme that sci-fi authors have explored deeply.
| Accelerando is a particularly fun and worthwhile read if you
| haven't already!
| Isamu wrote:
| The Bremermann limit is about computational density. It makes
| sense to talk about computers that are ever more powerful but
| not necessarily larger.
|
| So we talk about the supercomputers we call cell phones that
| are orders of magnitude more powerful than the desktop
| computers I used years ago.
|
| It doesn't make sense to talk about making super large
| computers before reaching the density limit, that's a
| confusion of concepts.
|
| Making computers faster has involved making them smaller
| because the speed of signal propagation.
| ompogUe wrote:
| Computronium! Kurzweil goes into this in the Singularity is
| Near.
|
| I've always wondered if Warlock from the New Mutants was made
| of it.
| fragmede wrote:
| > It's a theme that sci-fi authors have explored deeply.
|
| Having ingested every science fiction book that has been
| digitized, a fun evening to be had is writing your own book
| with ChatGPT.
| utopiah wrote:
| It's going to be Schmidhuber, isn't it?! /s
| newsoftheday wrote:
| I typed this into Gemini, "who invented the transistor?" and it
| correctly cites "John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William
| Shockley at Bell Telephone Laboratories in December 1947".
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If Lillienfeld had _working_ examples, how is Gemini correct
| that it was the Bell people?
| godelski wrote:
| When I ask Gemini and look at the sources it links this
| article...
| econ wrote:
| In his notes from November 1, 1913 Thomas Henry Moray described
| what later would be called the Moray valve. It used germanium.
| amarant wrote:
| Oskar Heil is a curious name, especially considering where and
| when he was from
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Check translate.google.com, for example: the morpheme is
| overloaded semantically so it's (topically) coincidental.
| cpldcpu wrote:
| This lists many transistor patents from oldest to newest.
|
| https://patents.google.com/?q=(H03F3%2f16)&sort=old
|
| The Matare/Welker Patent is missing though
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US2673948A/en.541
|
| The entire debate is tiring. It would be better if these reviews
| would put the actual device physics of the different concepts
| into context.
|
| Is there any report of a reproduction of the device proposed by
| Lilienfeld in his patents? If he managed to make functional
| devices back then, it should be possible today? (Note: Cu2S is
| not a very well controllable semiconductor...)
|
| Edit:
|
| Gemini Deep Research summary here, its quite informative:
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jE0wQVeWP9Eiybh_C6zMKeZ5...
|
| Also specifically on Cu based TFT:
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_B2x2gBPKgGFVgJyQ0qzPdI4...
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