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
History of the transistor and Y. Watanabe in 1950, and was finally able to produce some experimental prototypes in 1975. It was the fastest transistor through to the 1980s. Further developments included the grown-junction transistor (1951), the surface-barrier transistor (1953), the diffusion transistor, the tetrode transistor, and the pentode transistor. The diffused silicon 'mesa transistor' was developed at Bell in 1955 and made commercially available by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1958. The spacistor was a type of transistor developed in the 1950s as an improvement over the point-contact transistor and the later alloy junction transistor. In 1953, Philco had developed the world's first high frequency