Preamble: We live in a scientific and technological world that is so different from the world of a hundred years ago that if someone from that time were to land in our midst today, they are sure to find most things around them magical. Each of the technologies surrounding us today had one or a few seminal patents, the potential of which was perhaps seen by few other than the inventors themselves. However, those patents have had an inordinate impact on several technologies that followed. Let us explore each month for the next few months, one or more such patents that changed the world.
Electronics, which itself is the source of many other distinct technologies, can be said to have started with the invention of vacuum tubes. However, other electronic devices existed before that but never had a great impact on the future of electronics. The simplest vacuum tube, the diode, was invented in 1904 by John Ambrose Fleming. Lee de Forest is credited with inventing the triode vacuum tube in 1907, at about the same time as H. J. Round. These and other developments started the electronics revolution. A great number of devices and systems were enabled by these and many other types of vacuum tubes.
However, vacuum tubes have many disadvantages. They were bulky, heavy, fragile, and consumed a lot of power and generated heat. The equipment using vacuum tubes was hardly portable. For example, the first electronic computer, “ENIAC” – short for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer – used some 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighed about 25 metric tons and consumed about 150 kW of power. The ENIAC could add 5,000 numbers in just one second, an astounding achievement then. It was originally constructed in a large room at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering. It was later transported to the Aberdeen Proving Ground.
Then, in the late 1940s, three scientists, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley, were involved in inventing transistors using semiconductors, which changed the face of electronics completely. These devices could be called solid-state devices. We can say that they invented varieties of transistors and patented them. The patents were that of John Bardeen (US2524033A), Walter Brattain (US2663829A), and Shockley (US2778885A). These three contributed not only to the basic creation of transistors but also to the understanding of the Physics of the new devices.
For their contributions, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. The citation of the prize reads: The Nobel Prize in Physics 1956 was awarded jointly to William Bradford Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain “for their research on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.”
Akio Morita, a co-founder of Sony, licensed the transistor technology in the early 1950s from AT&T Bell Labs – the assignee of these patents. The license allowed Sony to produce and commercialize transistor-based products. This played a crucial role in the company’s growth and eventual success. TR-55, Japan’s first transistor radio, was one of Sony’s first major products, and it helped establish Sony as a leading electronics manufacturer. This move was pivotal in transforming Sony into a global electronics giant. Other major companies, the veritable “who’s who” of the electronics industry, who obtained licenses for the technology were Texas Instruments, Raytheon, General Electric, RCA, and Minneapolis-Honeywell, to name a few.
The rest, as they say, is history. Truly, the age of electronics was ushered in, which eventually led to the age of communication, computers, information technology, and so on. They, too, had seminal patents which kick-started them.
Author: JL Anil Kumar
First Published By: Lexology here