3:47 AM, 1943, somewhere outside Omaha. Harold Westin climbs a ladder for the forty-third time tonight. The air smells of burning glass and dying filaments. Another vacuum tube has failed. Another will fail before dawn.
The American telephone network was strangling itself. Every call required tubes. Tubes burned out. Men like Harold climbed ladders. Bell Labs needed a solution.
On December 23, 1947, three physicists in New Jersey built one. The transistor was announced on page 46 of the New York Times. Almost no one noticed.
This episode traces the invention that made everything else possible—and the human wreckage it left behind. John Bardeen, who won two Nobel Prizes and brought his family to the second ceremony. William Shockley, whose toxic genius drove away his best engineers and died estranged from his children. The "Traitorous Eight" who walked out of Shockley's laboratory and accidentally founded Silicon Valley.
The supreme irony: Shockley's failure as a manager was Silicon Valley's founding. If he had been decent to work for, the semiconductor industry might have grown up somewhere else entirely.
And Bell Labs? The institution that invented the transistor, won six Nobel Prizes, and produced more fundamental innovations than any other organization in history? It couldn't survive the world the transistor created.
The phone in your pocket contains 15 billion transistors. Harold Westin's job no longer exists.
What's on page 46 of today's newspaper?
The future is patient. It's still waiting for us to notice what comes next.