Hey there - with the recent anniversary of the transistor's invention, pictures of the first transistor have been all over the place. It brings up a question I've always wondered about: why are the leads connected to it so twisted? I mean it looks like they're intentionally twisted for some odd reason.
There are evidently two kinds of "twisted" lead visible. The big one with rectangular loops appears to be a compression spring, which maintains pressure on the contact between the flat slab of semiconductor at the bottom and the triangle above it. I imagine it was made with square bends so it could be tweaked in different directions. The thinner coils of wire are probably for strain relief, to mechanically isolate the stack of crystals from the plastic frame and the external connections.
On the Roswell UFO, from which all transistor designs were copied, the twisted leads allowed space for the flux capacitors. The Bell scientists just copied what they were given by the Air Force.
The one with the Lucite supports is a replica at Bell Labs. The original was even more messy. The original did not have the Lucite frame.
Yep. It's a paper clip "spring" to make it easy to position the point contact and to allow locating a suitable "hot spot". The wedge is a piece of insulating plastic with gold foil going down the two opposite edges, forming a tiny gap for the emitter and collector contacts. Zoom in on the image you posted to see the details. The spring supplies the necessary pressure to keep the point contacts in place and also makes it somewhat easy to position.
More info on the construction:
Yep. The square bends are from the width of whatever pliers were available to make the bend, thus causing square corners.
Nope. They're the two contact wires for the emitter and collector. The base is the slab of germanium on the base of the unit. Early circuit designs were all grounded base.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
The Roswell UFO is probably getting outdated.. It's why home computer cpu clock frequencies seem to be leveling off.. The Air Force is looking for a 'newer' UFO to crash for the latest in technology. A giant space net is also in the planning stages :P
Actually, it is a little known fact that the Roswell UFO's computer consisted of racks of 12AU7s powered by a blueberry yogurt-to- electricity converter.
The first transistor is truly a tip to bad construction. I like your solution though, instead of learning how to solder correctly just post an example of something worse.
I think that a lot of the speculation that the transistor is alien technology comes about when one looks at the technology curve. Up until about the 40's things were bumbling along though radio and TV were big deals and then wham, the curve shoots straight up right around 1945 or so.
Of course that's because a lot of things started happening during WW II. The development of centimeter RADAR was one of them. And centimeter RADAR spawned the development of the MASER.
Bell Labs was also a pure research facility. Their primary mission was to improve telecommunications but that was so broad that they were able to give us things like the LASER and to discover the CBO using the MASER that was developed by a labs alum.
The loss of the labs is going to hurt everyone in the long run.
These kinds of jumps happen all the time. Look at Isambard Kingdom Brunel, he designed and built a 4000 passenger steamship in 1856, considerably larger than anything else at the time, and not equaled for another 50 years. The Blackbird/Valkyrie of the time.
THANKS! That's the best photo of it I have yet found! The great part is that a PDF can be scaled larger, then hit PRINT SCREEN!, and VIOLA! Huge jpeg or bitmap of it!
Y'er welcome. The JPG photo of the transistor appears to be 400 x 400 x 24 bits. That will scale to a larger print but is far from "huge". If I expand it 4 times to my screen width (1600 pixels), there is some obvious pixelization. Are you doing something different?
Google image search returns some better photos:
with higher resolution.
I found a video clip that explains the construction of the first xsistor:
The wiring diagram in that PDF is the only one I could find that actually showed the gold foil traces down the side of the wedge and the "tiny gap" at the tip.
This kinda looks like the original:
Proof positive that the uglier it looks, the better it works.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
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