Currently the concensus is that J. E. Lilienfeld's transistors of 1926
were never built, and could not have worked. But every time I read
stuff about Lilienfeld, the hair on the back of my neck stands right
up. My gut feeling has always been that something is wrong. I'm led
to ask, what evidence is this concensus about Lilienfeld based?
In 1981 the semiconductor physicist H. E. Stockman said "Lilienfeld
demonstrated his remarkable tubeless radio receiver on many occasions,
but God help a fellow who at that time threatened the reign of the
tube." See Bell Labs Memorial: Who really invented the transistor?,
starting at "Oscillating Crystals":
http://www.bellsystemmemorial.com/belllabs_transistor1.html
And below is a paper which details some history of the laboratory
testing of Lilienfeld's patent claims by others: The Other Transistor:
early history of the MOSFET See pp235-236:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=730824
Briefly:
In 1964 a physicist V. Bottom asked in Physics Today magazine whether
Lilienfeld's transistors worked, and J. B. Johnson of Bell Labs
responded saying that he'd tested them and they didn't.
This then is probably the origin of the story that Lilienfeld never had
any working hardware. An apparently trustworthy physicist (well known,
of Johnson Noise fame) said so.
Then in 1995 R. G. Arns found a 1948 Bell Labs patent deposition by
Johnson which said the opposite: that Bell Labs back then had a project
to test Lilienfeld's transistors, and before Johnson took over the
project, Shockely and Pearson had built a variation of Lilienfeld's
aluminum oxide MOSFET from his patent and found only an 11% modulation
index, but that "useful power output is substantial" ( ! ) And then
they published a paper about this result. ( !! ) After
Shockley/Pearson's success, Johnson had tested the other two Lilienfeld
patents and was unable to replicate them ...so Johnson was only
dishonest by omission, by covering up the fact that Bell Labs well knew
that Lilienfeld had something real. Between these times B. Crawford in
1991 built successful but unstable Lilienfeld MOSFETs as his MS
dissertation, and saw evidence that Lilienfeld must have built similar
devices. In 1995 J. Ross built stable Lilienfeld MOSFETs. In addition
to all this, a 1934 patent by Oskar Heil exists for another thin-film
MOSFET.
The author makes very telling statements about the honesty of these
physicists:
"Published scientific, technical, and historical papers
by these Bell scientists never mention either Lilienfeld's or
Heil's prior work."
"Why ... did Bell Laboratories personnel fail to
acknowledge the earlier work of persons such as
Lilienfeld and Heil? None of the Bell publications on
transistors carries a reference to their work, not even
the 1948 paper in which Shockley and Pearson
demonstrated the field-effect experimentally. We also
have J. B. Johnson's 1964 public response to Virgil
Bottom compared to the admission contained in his
1949 affidavit filed in support of patent proceedings: the
1964 statement, by failing to mention Shockley and
Pearson's 1948 confirmation of Lilienfeld's US Patent
No. 1,900,018, appears to have been deliberately
misleading. .The official history of the Bell System
electronics work mentions Lilienfeld's and Heil's
patents only in endnotes to a footnote. The footnote
speaks of earlier patents which 'date back to the 1920s'
and states that 'apparently all attempts to realise these
concepts were futile[33]. In 1988, John Bardeen finally
admitted that 'He [Lilienfeld] had the basic concept of
controlling the flow of current in a semiconductor to
make an amplifing devicee''[34]. It seems possible that
Shockley et al. had given up on the MOSFET idea
due to surface problems; otherwise the admission, in
Johnson's affidavit, that the Shockley and Pearson
experiment corresponded to Lilienfeld's patent, would
not have been so easy. It is also likely that they were
silent and/or dismissive in their own publications and
utterances in order to bolster their patent applications
and to minimise challenges to their priority."
One is led to wonder what the 1956 Nobel prize committee would have
thought had they known that Lilienfeld had built a functioning
pre-1940 transistor radio, and that Shockley had avoided referencing
Lilienfeld's work in Shockley's 1948 paper announcing that Lilienfeld's
FET transistors gave substantial gain.
The three Lilienfeld patents:
1,745,175 filed 1926, granted 1930
1,877,140 filed 1928, granted 1932
1,900,018 filed 1928, granted 1933
See US Patent Search:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm
((((((((((((((((((((((( ( ( (o) ) ) )))))))))))))))))))))))
William J. Beaty Research Engineer
[email protected] UW Chem Dept, Bagley Hall RM74
[email protected] Box 351700, Seattle, WA 98195-1700
ph425-222-5066 http//staff.washington.edu/wbeaty/
