History of the transistor about 15 volts". Brattain and H. R. Moore made a demonstration to several of their colleagues and managers at Bell Labs on the afternoon of 23 December 1947, often given as the birth date of the transistor. The "PNP point-contact germanium transistor" operated as a speech amplifier with a power gain of 18 in that trial. In 1956 John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain, and William Bradford Shockley were honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect". Twelve people are mentioned as directly involved in the invention of the transistor
Ig Nobel Prize Ig Nobel Prize The Ig Nobel Prize ( ) is a parody of the Nobel Prize awarded every autumn to celebrate ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. Since 1991, the Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The name of the award is a pun on the word "ignoble," which means "characterized by baseness, lowness, or meanness," and is satirical social criticism that identifies "absurd" research, although, occasionally, such research has succeeded in yielding useful knowledge. Organized by the scientific humor magazine, the "Annals of Improbable