In 1947 John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley at Bell Labs demonstrated the point-contact transistor, a solid-state device that could amplify and switch electrical signals. It replaced the bulky, hot and fragile vacuum tube, and once fabricated together on a single chip as the integrated circuit it allowed electronic functions to be miniaturised and mass-produced cheaply. Successive generations of ever-smaller semiconductor devices became the foundation of all modern electronics and computing. The inventors received the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
It founded the electronics and computing industries, whose research campuses and innovation clusters, above all Silicon Valley, became a defining urban-economic form of the later twentieth century.
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