1951 Bell Telephone Laboratories Transistor Symposium

[RonFred2]

Biophysics Lab has just scanned and made freely available a rare book from 1951 called "The Transistor" - selected papers from Bell Lab's first symposium on the transistor.
Perhaps some of the EEVBlog readers would be interested in downloading this book...

https://www.biophysicslab.com/2022/12/18/1951-bell-telephone-laboratories-transistor-symposium/

[moffy]

Truly pioneering days. Bell labs was one of the great scientific institutions.

[RoGeorge]

Wow, that's a lot of pages, will be a great joy to read through the scanned book during this holiday, thank you! 

[mawyatt]

What a wonderful and historic book, must read and study for anyone interesting in semiconductors and transistors.

What an effort to photocopy each and every page, so hats off to you 

Thanks for the copying effort, and sharing

Best,

[niconiconi]

What a coincidence. I was just made aware of its existence by an article a few days earlier and today the book itself shows up online!

Computer History Museum describes this book as "Ma Bell's Cookbook" and "the bible of the dynamic semiconductor industry that emerged in the 1950s".

[...] Morton advocated sharing this transistor technology with other researchers and companies because Bell Labs and its parent AT&T could benefit from advances made elsewhere. So during the 1950s they sponsored three gatherings at which other scientists and engineers visited Bell Labs to learn the new semiconductor technology first hand. Held in September 1951, the first meeting specifically addressed military users and applications.

In April 1952, over 100 representatives from 40 companies that had paid a $25,000 patent-licensing fee came for a nine-day Transistor Technology Symposium, including a visit to Western Electric's ultramodern transistor manufacturing plant in Allentown, PA. There were participants from such electronics titans as GE and RCA, as well as from then-small firms like Texas Instruments and Sony. Published by Bell Labs and subsequently by D. Van Nostrand in a revised edition, the proceedings of the first symposium - The Transistor fondly recognized as "Ma Bell's Cookbook" - became the bible of the dynamic semiconductor industry that emerged in the 1950s.

https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/bell-labs-licenses-transistor-technology/

[Terry Bites]

Does it mention what a b*stard William Shockley was to the transistor's co-inventors. He was a racist who agreed with hitler about the application of eugenics.
A real charmer!

[mawyatt]

And the Trairorous Eight at Shockley Semiconductor Labs of which Moore, Noyce and Hoerni were 3 of the 8!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

Best,

[Conrad Hoffman]

Thanks! What a fantastic book. I wasn't aware of just how much was known in 1951 and how many of those concepts we still use today.

[RoGeorge]

Does it mention what a b*stard William Shockley was to the transistor's co-inventors. He was a racist who agreed with hitler about the application of eugenics.
A real charmer!

Propaganda must be very high with you, since you needed to scream "Hitler bad" and "racism" in a topic about an electronic book from 70 years ago.   

Is that all you have to say about the effort to scan and post a book for free, from a seminar that used to be $25000/attendee and with historical value?

Shockley didn't come to the seminar, as per this link in the blog references:

"Gerald Pearson gave a short dissertation on semiconductor theory. (Bill Shockley had asserted his independence by choosing not to appear, a source of irritation to Jack Morton.)"

References:
...
Attending the 1951 Symposium,  from an Attendee’s Viewpoint
https://www.smecc.org/attending_the_1951_symposium.htm