Walter Houser Brattain Walter Houser Brattain Walter Houser Brattain (; February 10, 1902 – October 13, 1987) was an American physicist at Bell Labs who, along with fellow scientists John Bardeen and William Shockley, invented the point-contact transistor in December 1947. They shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention. Brattain devoted much of his life to research on surface states. Walter Brattain was born in Xiamen, Fujian, China, to American parents Ross R. Brattain and Ottilie Houser Brattain. Ross R. Brattain was a teacher at the Ting-Wen Institute, a private school for Chinese boys. Both parents were graduates of Whitman
Invention of the integrated circuit of electronic devices required reducing the number of their components. The invention of the transistor in 1947 led to the expectation of a new technological revolution. Fiction writers and journalists heralded the imminent appearance of "intelligent machines" and robotization of all aspects of life. Although transistors did reduce the size and power consumption, they could not solve the problem of reliability of complex electronic devices. On the contrary, dense packing of components in small devices hindered their repair. While the reliability of discrete components was brought to the theoretical limit in the 1950s, there was no improvement in the connections