Crystal Fire: Birth of the Information Age (Sloan Technology) Book

An eloquent retelling of the story behind one of the twentieth century's miracle advances the transistor. On December 16, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, physicists at Bell Laboratories, jabbed two electrodes into a sliver of germanium. The power coming out of the germanium was one hundred times stronger than what went in. With that, the transistor was born and the information age began. It is hard to imagine any device more crucial to modern life than the microchip and the transistor from which it sprang. Every waking hour people take the vast benefits of these for granted in cellular phones, ATMs, computers, radios, TV sets, fax machines, and thousands of other electronic devices. Without a doubt, the transistor is the most important artifact of the twentieth century and the "nerve cell" of our electronic age. The Bell Labs transistor team was headed by William Shockley who shared the Nobel Prize with Bardeen and Brattain. Eventually Schockley went on to form the first semiconductor company in what would become Silicon Valley. Above all, Crystal Fire is a tale of the human factors in technology pride and jealousy coupled with scientific aspirations that ignited the greatest technological explosion in history. Read More