point contact transistor

A point-contact transistor was the first type of solid-state electronic transistor ever constructed. It was developed by research scientists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Laboratories in December, 1947. They worked in a group led by physicist William Shockley. The group had been working together on experiments and theories of electric field effects in solid state materials, with the aim of replacing vacuum tubes with a smaller, less power-consuming device.