Who Invented the Transistor?

Summary

On 22 Oct 1925, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (a Polish1 professor in Germany) patented the field-effect transistor (FET).[LIL1] In 1928, he also patented the metal oxide semiconductor FET (MOSFET).[LIL2] Lilienfeld's designs worked.[ARN98][ROS95] The much later point-contact transistor (Bell Labs, 1948) was a dead end:[LIL4] today, almost all of the billions of trillions of transistors in our computers and smartphones are FETs of the Lilienfeld type. In 1934, German engineer Oskar Heil patented another FET variant.[HEIL] Two decades after Lilienfeld, researchers at Bell Labs not only experimentally confirmed the field-effect described in Lilienfeld's patents[ARN98]—see the priority dispute Lilienfeld vs Bell Labs below—but also patented a point-contact transistor (PCT, patent filed on 26 February 1948 by William Shockley & John Bardeen & Walter Brattain).[BRA48] A few months later, the transistron (a junction field-effect transistor or JFET) was patented by German physicists Herbert F. Mataré and Heinrich Welker in France at Compagnie des Freins et Signaux Westinghouse (patent filed on 13 August 1948).[MAT48] The PCT and the transistron were the first commercial transistors. In hindsight, however, the 1948 PCT—which was "never quite practical" and "merely a detour"[ARN98]—was a dead end, and today, almost all transistors are FETs of the Lilienfeld type, in particular, certain MOSFET[LIL2] variants patented by Egyptian engineer Mohamed M. Atalla and Korean engineer Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1960.[ATA60] According to legal files (1948) examined by American physicist Robert G. Arns,[ARN98] William Shockley & Gerald Pearson at Bell Labs had confirmed the field-effect described in Lilienfeld's patents. Unfortunately, "published scientific, technical, and historical papers by these Bell scientists never mention either Lilienfeld’s or Heil’s prior work,"[ARN98] "not even a 1948 paper[SHO48] in which Shockley & Pearson demonstrated the field-effect experimentally."[ARN98] In N...