Walter Brattain

Walter Brattain built the first working transistor with his own hands, and remained an experimentalist who preferred the bench to administration. Born in Amoy, China in 1902, where his father was teaching, he was raised on a cattle ranch in Washington state and did heavy ranch work as a boy, which he said convinced him to find another line of employment. He took a degree at Whitman College, a master's at Oregon and a doctorate at Minnesota, where he studied under John Van Vleck, and joined Bell Labs in 1929. He spent his career on the surface properties of semiconductors, a specialisation that turned out to be exactly what was needed. After the war he joined the solid-state group under William Shockley with the theorist John Bardeen. Their target was a semiconductor amplifier, and their repeated failures were explained by Bardeen's proposal that charges trapped at the surface screened the material's interior. Brattain was the one who could make things work. Through late 1947 he and Bardeen tried arrangements of contacts and electrolytes on germanium. On 16 December he fixed a strip of gold foil over a plastic triangle, slit it with a razor blade to make two contacts a fraction of a millimetre apart, and pressed it onto a germanium slab. It amplified. They demonstrated it to management on 23 December 1947, the date usually given for the transistor's invention. He and Bardeen shared the 1956 Nobel Prize with Shockley, whose behaviour over patents and credit soured the collaboration permanently; Brattain afterwards refused to work under him. He returned to teaching at Whitman College in 1967 and worked on the surfaces of living cells. He died in 1987.

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