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 Committee awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to Kilby "for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit". Noyce died in 1990 and thus could not be nominated; when asked during his life about the prospects of the Nobel Prize he replied "They don't give Nobel Prizes for engineering or real work". Because of the confidentiality of the Nobel nomination procedure, it is not known whether other IC inventors had been considered. Saxena argued that the contribution of Kilby was pure engineering rather than basic science, and thus his nomination violated the will of Alfred Nobel. The two-inventor version