The transistor
The tiny switch everything modern rests on
See it on the timeline →In depth
Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley at Bell Labs demonstrated the point-contact transistor in 1947. Together with the integrated circuit ten years later it produced an exponential cost curve — Moore's law — unmatched in the history of technology: the price per computation has fallen by roughly a factor of a trillion. Everything from spaceflight and medical imaging to the internet, mobile networks and machine learning follows directly. Few inventions have had so much effect with so little contemporary attention.
For children
A transistor is a tiny switch with no moving parts. It can turn current on and off billions of times a second. Your phone contains tens of billions of them — they are the building blocks of everything digital.
Connects to
Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org