Item #887 Physical Principles Involved in Transistor Action. WITH: The Theory of p-n Junctions in Semiconductors and p-n Junction Transistors. Et al. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, William Shockley.

Physical Principles Involved in Transistor Action. WITH: The Theory of p-n Junctions in Semiconductors and p-n Junction Transistors. Et al.

"The Transistor was probably the most important invention of the 20th Century..." -Ira Flatow

FIRST EDITION of two landmark journals documenting the revolutionary invention of the transistor: the April 1949 issue of The Bell System Technical Journal containing the first description of the invention (published simultaneously in The Physical Review), and the famous July 1949 “Semiconductor Issue” dedicated entirely to the discuss of the transistor and semiconductor devices. The entire 1949 volume offered.

“In the 1930s, Bell Labs scientists were trying to use ultrahigh frequency waves for telephone communications, and needed a more reliable detection method than the vacuum tube, which proved incapable of picking up rapid vibrations... John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley spearheaded the Bell Labs effort to develop a new means of amplification,” developing, by 1948, a novel device that would effectively amplify and control electric signals. “At roughly half an inch high, the first transistor was huge by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit onto a single silicon chip. But it was the very first solid state device capable of doing the amplification work of a vacuum tube, earning Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. More significantly, it spawned an entire industry and ushered in the Information Age, revolutionizing global society” (The American Physical Society).

The 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".

Also included is Claude Shannon's Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems (pp. 656-715).

BARDEEN, J., and BRATTAIN, W. H. Physical Principles Involved in Transistor Action. In The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 28, No. 2, April 1949 (pp. 239-277). WITH: BARDEEN, J., and BRATTAIN, W.H., and SHOCKLEY, W., et al. The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 28, No. 3. July, 1949. New York: American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1949. Octavo, contemporary blue buckram. The whole volume with all the issues for 1949 (753 pages, complete with contents and index). Fine copy.

Price: $1,650 .