World of Computer Science on Walter Houser Brattain
A small semiconducting device capable of great amplification, the transistor, invented by Walter Houser Brattain and colleagues John Bardeen and William Shockley, revolutionized many aspects of modern society, especially systems of communication. In recognition of this work, Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics.
Brattain was born in Amoy, China, on February 10, 1902. He was the eldest of five children born to Ross R. Brattain and Ottilie Houser Brattain. At the time of Walter's birth, his father was employed as a teacher in a school for Chinese boys. While Walter was still a young child, his family returned to the United States and settled in Washington state, where both of his parents' families had been pioneers. Brattain spent his childhood on a cattle ranch near the small town of Tonasket, where he attended public schools. He later told the editors of Those Inventive Americans that he loved the out-of-doors, but was not very fond of farming. "Following three horses and a harrow in the dust was what made a physicist out of me," he said.
With no desire to stay on the family ranch, Brattain entered Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, in 1920, earning his B.S. degree in physics four years later. During his senior year he was elected to the national honorary fraternity Phi Beta Kappa and the national scientific society, Sigma Xi. He moved on to the University of Oregon to complete his master's degree in physics in 1926 and then to the University of Minnesota for his Ph.D. in 1929. While completing his doctorate, Brattain took a job in the radio section of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS). It was "the only non-teaching job I was offered. I was a very green Ph.D. [in fact, he had not yet received the degree], and I didn't feel qualified to teach," he added in Those Inventive Americans.
Shortly after receiving his Ph.D., Brattain was offered a job at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, one of the major corporate research centers in the United States. During his first few years at the Bell Labs, Brattain was engaged in a variety of projects, including research on infrared radiation, frequency standards, and magnetic phenomena. In 1936, however, his work focused in a new direction upon the arrival at Bell Labs of William Shockley.
Shockley had been working on finding a substitute for the bulky three-vacuum-tube core that made up the modern radio. He knew that a special type of material known as a semiconductor had been used in early radios as a rectifier, a device that changes alternating current to direct current. Semiconductors are material that conduct an electric current better than a nonconductor, but not as well as a conductor. Speculating that other kinds of semiconductors might also be suitable as amplifiers, Shockley designed a number of arrangements containing semiconductors that he though might work. Brattain's job was to build and test each of these arrangements; he found that none of them worked as Shockley had hoped and predicted.
After a half dozen years of research, these trials were interrupted by World War II. Brattain and Shockley were both assigned to work at Columbia University on devices for the magnetic detection of submarines. After twenty-two months of wartime research, Brattain and Shockley returned to Bell Labs, where they were joined by a new partner, John Bardeen. Like Shockley, Bardeen was primarily a theorist. He studied the work being done on semiconductors in the Bell Labs and concluded that earlier failures might be explained by an accumulation of electrons on the surface of the semiconductors. Based on this suggestion, an accelerated program for the detailed study of semiconductor surfaces was initiated.
Late in 1947, important progress in the development of Shockley's semiconductor amplifier had been made. Brattain and Bardeen constructed a device consisting of a germanium crystal with two closely spaced (0.005 cm apart) gold contacts on one side and a third terminal on the opposite side. When an electrical signal was fed into one side of the crystal, it was emitted on the opposite side with an amplification of 18. The success of this invention was announced publicly in July of 1948, but the news received very little interest. It was buried on page 46 of the New York Times, for example, with no mention of its enormous potential.
Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley also realized that the new device, now called a transistor (for transfer resistor), could be greatly improved. Soon Shockley suggested modifying the transistor design so that it contained a p-type semiconductor (electron-deficient) on one side and an n-type semiconductor (electron surplus) on the other side. By 1950, Brattain had built and successfully tested such a device. For their invention of the transistor, Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics.
Brattain continued to study the properties of semiconductors at Bell Labs until he reached mandatory retirement age of sixty-five in 1967. He then returned to Washington state and Whitman College to teach physics to non-majors and to carry out research on the physical properties of living cell surfaces. He retired from Whitman in 1972 and remained in Washington state until his death in Seattle on October 13, 1987.
Brattain was married on July 5, 1935, to the former Keren Gilmore, a physical chemist. They had one son, William Gilmore. After his first wife died in April of 1957, he was married a second time, to Emma Jane Kirsch Miller, on May 10, 1958. Among Brattain's honors were the Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1952, the John Scott Award of the city of Philadelphia in 1955, and election to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1974.
This is the complete article, containing 949 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).
