Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley

At Bell Labs in December 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain pressed two gold contacts onto a slab of germanium and found that a small current at one contact controlled a much larger one at the other. It was the first working transistor: an amplifier with no vacuum, no heater and no glass.

William Shockley led the group and was not in the room. He was angry enough about the credit that he spent the following weeks designing a better device on his own — the junction transistor, which is the kind actually manufactured and the kind on this board.

All three shared the Nobel Prize in 1956. Bardeen went on to win a second one, for superconductivity, and is still the only person to have won two in physics. Shockley later moved to California, hired the engineers who left to found Fairchild and then Intel, and spent his last decades promoting racial theories that destroyed his reputation.

Nearly everything after this is transistors: the chip, the computer, the phone. A 2N2222 on this board is that invention, in a package that costs pennies.