Alcatel-Lucent 1947, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, William Shockley of Bell Labs invented the transistor. In 1956, they received a Nobel Prize for their invention. The transistor led to an electronics revolution during the post-war boom. The transition from vacuum tubes to transistors enabled all technologies to be built on a smaller scale and use less electricity. Items that before required large dedicated spaces, could now fit into a home or even on a kitchen counter. In 1954, Gerald Pearson, Darryl Chapin and Calvin Fuller invented the solar cell. Telstar, the first active communications satellite also developed by Bell Labs and launched
Nobel Prize controversies Chen-Ning Yang—by providing him in 1956 with a possible test method for beta decay that worked successfully. Her book "Beta Decay" (1965) is still a sine qua non reference for nuclear physicists. Several Nobel Prizes were awarded for research related to the concepts of the boson, Bose–Einstein statistics and Bose–Einstein condensate—the latest being the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics given for advancing the theory of Bose–Einstein condensates although Satyendra Nath Bose himself was not awarded the Nobel Prize. In his book "The Scientific Edge", physicist Jayant Narlikar observed: "SN Bose's work on particle statistics (c.1922), which clarified the behavior of