On January 12, 1956, a diffused base transistor was unveiled at Laureldale before top military brass at a solid-state diffusion symposium. That was the same year that Bell Labs' scientists Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley received the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for the invention of the transistor. "Bell Laboratories scientists in Murray Hill, N.J., may have won the Nobel Prizes and gotten most of the press, but Allentown and Reading delivered the goods," notes Stuart W. Leslie, a historian of science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.