IN THE BEGINNING

The junction transistor, technologically the most important solid-stat e device, invented theoretically by W. B, Shockley on January 23, 1948 , brought about the semiconductor revolution. That invention was trigg ered by the experimental discovery of the point-contact transistor by W. Brattain and J. Bardeen 38 days earlier. Bardeen's notebook entries at Bell Telephone Laboratories for the crucial 100-day period Novembe r 21, 1947-February 29, 1948 have been examined to ascertain why this winner of two Nobel Prizes in physics could not invent the junction tr ansistor. It was found that the boundary between the thin p-type inver sion layer and the n-type bulk germanium semiconductor in their origin al point-contact transistor discovery was characterized as a ''high re sistance boundary'' in macroscopic electrical engineering terms by Bar deen, the electrical engineer turned mathematical physicist. Pages fro m Shockley's notebook are reproduced in full to show what exactly he w as thinking on December 16, 1947, the day the point-contact transistor was experimentally discovered by Brattain and Bardeen. The origin of U.S. Patent 2524035 has been traced to the Bell Telephone Laboratories notebook pages of its inventors and examined. It is shown that this p atent could not be considered as the first patent describing Shockley' s revolutionary theoretical invention of the minority carrier injectio n concept underlying bipolar transistor action.