Author: Dan Maloney / Source: Hackaday
Here’s a fun exercise: take a list of the 20th century’s inventions and innovations in electronics, communications, and computing. Make sure you include everything, especially the stuff we take for granted. Now, cross off everything that can’t trace its roots back to the AT&T Corporation’s research arm, the Bell Laboratories.
We’d wager heavily that the list would still contain almost everything that built the electronics age: microwave communications, data networks, cellular telephone, solar cells, Unix, and, of course, the transistor.But is that last one really true? We all know the story of Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley, the brilliant team laboring through a blizzard in 1947 to breathe life into a scrap of germanium and wires, finally unleashing the transistor upon the world for Christmas, a gift to usher us into the age of solid state electronics. It’s not so simple, though. The quest for a replacement for the vacuum tube for switching and amplification goes back to the lab of Julius Lilienfeld, the man who conceived the first field-effect transistor in the mid-1920s.
Vacuums and Emissions
You’d expect big things from a physicist whose Ph.D. advisor was none other than Max Planck, and while Julius Lilienfeld isn’t exactly a household name, he had a long and productive career. Born in 1882 in present-day Lviv, now in Ukraine but then part of Austria-Hungary, Lilienfeld trained at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin.
He earned his doctorate in physics in 1905 and took a non-tenure track professorship at Leipzig University. There he concentrated on the physics of electric discharges in a vacuum, which led directly to some of his earliest patents for medical X-ray tubes. He also worked on cryogenic gasses, leading to work with Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin and his famous dirigibles.Clearly more of an applied physicist than a theoretician – he only achieved a “satisfactory” rating from Planck on his examination of his knowledge of Maxwell-Hertz equations – Lilienfeld was more eager to patent his ideas than publish scholarly papers on them. He traveled to the United States in 1921 to pursue…
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