section_path: History of development/First transistor
section_name: First transistor
paragraph_text: First transistor
  
  The Bell team made many attempts to build such a system with various tools but generally failed. Setups, where the contacts were close enough, were invariably as fragile as the original cat's whisker detectors had been, and would work briefly, if at all. Eventually, they had a practical breakthrough. A piece of gold foil was glued to the edge of a plastic wedge, and then the foil was sliced with a razor at the tip of the triangle. The result was two very closely spaced contacts of gold. When the wedge was pushed down onto the surface of a crystal and voltage was applied to the other side (on the base of the crystal), current started to flow from one contact to the other as the base voltage pushed the electrons away from the base towards the other side near the contacts. The point-contact transistor had been invented.
  
  While the device was constructed a week earlier, Brattain's notes describe the first demonstration to higher-ups at Bell Labs on the afternoon of 23 December 1947, often given as the birthdate of the transistor. What is now known as the " p–n–p point-contact germanium transistor " operated as a speech amplifier with a power gain of 18 in that trial. John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain, and William Bradford Shockley were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for their work.