I am not a fan of William Shockley (1910 – 1989), born in London, with a father who was a mining engineer, and with a childhood spent in Palo Alto, Californa. He initially studied at Caltech, in Pasadena, California, but attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for his Ph.D., before beginning work at Bell Labs, in Holmdel, New Jersey.
Bill was co-recipient of the Nobel prize in Physics in 1956 along with John Bardeen (1908 – 1991) and Walter Houser Brattain (1902–1987), for the invention of the transistor. Bardeen was born in Madison Wisconsin, educated in electrical engineering at the university there, then taking a Ph.D in mathematical physics at Princeton University, in New Jersey. He is the only double laureate in physics, being awarded the second one in 1972, with others. Brattain was born in Amoy (now Xiamen), China, to American parents. Much of his early life was spent in Washington State. He took his BS at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, then a MA at the University of Oregon, but took his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota.
Despite the transistor being developed by Shockley et al, it was invented by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (1882 – 1963), who filed a patent for the field-effect transistor principle in Canada on 1925-10-22, 100 years before the publication of this weblog post. In the 1990s one of Lilienfeld’s designs worked as described showing substantial gain = amplification. Legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that William Shockley and Gerald Pearson (1905 – 1987), who both worked at Bell Labs, had built operational versions from Lilienfeld’s patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles. To my mind this is intellectual fraud.
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld was born to a Ashkenazi Jewish family in Lemberg = present-day Lviv, the largest city in Western Ukraine, but at the time in the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
After graduating high school in 1899, Lilienfeld studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (renamed Humboldt University in 1949), in Berlin, between 1900 and 1904. There he received his Ph.D. in 1905, before starting work at the physics institute at Leipzig University as an untenured professor.
At Leipzig, he worked on electrical discharges in the vacuum between metal electrodes, from about 1910. He was responsible for the identification of auto-electronic emission = field electron emission as a separate physical effect. He was interested in it as a possible electron source for miniaturised X-ray tubes, in medical applications. Lilienfeld was responsible for the first reliable account in English of the experimental phenomenology of field electron emission, in 1922. The effect was further explained by Fowler and Nordheim in 1928.
Lilienfeld moved to USA in 1921, becoming an American citizen in 1934. He also retained Polish citizenship. He worked as an electrical engineer and physicist, and was credited with the first patent on the field-effect transistor in 1925. However, he was never able to build a working practical semiconductor device based on his concept, in part because high-purity semiconductor materials were not available to him.
Lilienfeld married an American, Beatrice Ginsburg, in New York City on 1926-05-02. They lived in Winchester, Massachusetts, where Lilienfeld was director of Amrad owned by Magnavox, later named the Ergon Research Laboratories in Malden.
In the United States Lilienfeld did research on anodic aluminum oxide films, patenting the electrolytic capacitor in 1931, the method continuing to be used throughout the century. He also invented a FET-like transistor, filing several patents describing the construction and operation of transistors, as well as many features of modern transistors. FET refers to Field Effect Transistor. (US patent #1,745,175 is for a FET-like transistor. It was granted 1930-01-28.) When Brattain, Bardeen, and their colleague chemist Robert Gibney tried to get patents on their earliest devices, most of their claims were rejected due to the Lilienfeld patent.
After Ergon closed in 1935, the Lilienfelds built a house on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands in hope of escaping an allergy associated with wheat fields, from which Lilienfeld had suffered for most of his life. Lilienfeld frequently traveled between St. Thomas and various mainland locations and continued to test new ideas and patent the resulting products.
The optical radiation emitted when electrons strike a metal surface is named Lilienfeld radiation after Lilienfeld first discovered it close to X-ray tube anodes. Its origin is attributed to the excitation of plasmons in the metal surface. In physics, a plasmon is a quantum of plasma oscillation. Just as light (an optical oscillation) consists of photons, the plasma oscillation consists of plasmons. The plasmon can be considered as a quasiparticle since it arises from the quantization of plasma oscillations, just like phonons are quantizations of mechanical vibrations.
The American Physical Society has named one of its major prizes after Lilienfeld.
