Transistor inventor dies
Sparks goes out
THE BLOKE WHO brought the world the junction transistor and was responsible for the digital revolution, Morgan Sparks, has died. He was 91.
Sparks, who led Sandia National Laboratories for nearly a decade, came up with a working practical transistor. OK, he didn’t invent the idea. That was worked out by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for it.
Sparks developed the microwatt junction transistor in 1951 which replaced vacuum tubes and made computers practical.
His family knew he did something with transistors but didn’t really understand how important he was to the whole age until the world went digital.
Sparks was preceded in death by his wife of 57 years, Elizabeth MacEvoy Sparks. The couple had four children. µ
L'Inq
LC Sun
Comments
syncom, part deux
There's conspiracy books that say the transistor was actually "invented" by aliens (ie - back-engineered from others technology).1947! The way of the future....
groan
Looks like he ran out of gain!He saturated!
He recombinated in the ultimate junction
All your base (and emitter and collector) are belong to him!
I have better stop in case someone suspects me of being bipolar!
you negated a previous article
Well, if anyone there at your "job" remembers, you posted an article about a year ago about the real person who invented the transistor.He was over 50 years older than this guy and he lived in poverty. I think he lived in the Ukraine, but I am not sure. I have had a hard time figuring out what his name has been since then. However, I am sure someone there knows. He did in fact both create and do the theory for a transistor.
Invention is complex
The way the current patent mess has us thinking invention works is that an individual with an idea is all there is to invention. For big things like transistors its usually a process. People were thinking about semiconductors before WW2 because they were using them, they just didn't understand how they worked. Shockey et al developed the first viable theory -- not a practical device -- and this guy makes Product #1.Moving from valves to transistors was difficult because they work so differently -- they're current rather than voltage devices. Early transistor circuits were hobbled by trying to use them as triodes (they were even sold like valves). They didn't work that well either.They didn't really become useful until the silicon planar process was invented in the late 50s/early 60s.
I read years ago in a electronics book from the 1930s that some German had observed a semiconductor amplifying effect, a bit like a MOSFET but nobody really understood it, it was just a curiousity.
inventor
Julius Edgar Lilienfeldhttp://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/history/lilienfeld.htm