Brattain, Walter Houser

Brattain, Walter Houser (1902-1987), an American physicist, shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956 with his colleagues John Bardeen and William Shockley for inventing the transistor, which ushered in the era of microminiature electronic parts and led to today's computers.

Brattain was born in Xiamen, China, where his father, a recent graduate of Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, was teaching science and math. The following year, the Brattain family returned to Washington, where Walter and his brother, Robert, spent much of their youth helping out on the family's cattle ranch near the Canadian border. In 1920, he enrolled at Whitman College, where he majored in physics and math. After completing a bachelor's degree in physics at Whitman in 1924, Brattain earned a master's degree at the University of Oregon (1926) and a doctorate degree at the University of Minnesota (1929). Britain's first job, as a radio engineer at the National Bureau of Standards, left him anxious to return to physics. At a meeting of the American Physical Society, his thesis adviser, John Tate, introduced him to Joseph Becker of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, a major U.S. corporate research center. Becker hired Brattain and he remained at Bell Labs until his retirement in 1967.

Upon arrival at Becker's lab in New York City in summer 1929, Brattain began working with copper-oxide rectifiers. A rectifier is a device for changing alternating current into direct current. Brattain and Becker hoped to use copper-oxide rectifiers to make an amplifier similar in design to a vacuum tube. An amplifier strengthens electrical impulses. A vacuum tube is a tubelike glass or metal shell in which various plates and wires are mounted. The vacuum tube gets its name from the fact that almost all the air must be removed from the tube for it to work.

Although the two researchers did not succeed, Brattain was able to impress the president of Bell Labs, Mervin Kelly. In March 1940, Kelly summoned Brattain and Becker to his office, where he showed them the work of another Bell Labs scientist, Russell Ohl. Ohl had accidentally discovered a mysterious effect that occurred in a cracked silicon crystal. When light was shined on the crystal, the amount of current flowing through the crystal changed. Brattain first thought that he and Becker were the butts of a practical joke, but he quickly came up with an impromptu explanat

Page [1] [2] [3] [4]