"On 16 December 1947, William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain succeeded in building the first practical point-contact transistor at Bell Labs."
That’s from Wikipedia’s entry. The full background story, proceeding from the radar work that helped win World War II, is in Robert Buderi’s 1996 book "The Invention that Changed the World: The Story of Radar from War to Peace." It’s a good, if necessarily a bit technical, read. I recommend it in this month of the sixtieth anniversary of the transistor, the development that, among many other things, allows me to write these postings to be read by folks on the other side of the world.
Via Instapundit
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 