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Go
To
Play
"The transistor was the realization of a dream—a very directly expressed
dream, in many cases, of having a solid-state amplifier... It really was
just flowering around the lab at the time... Originally it was sort of
envisioned as a replacement for the vacuum tube—and it was that—but
it was a whole lot more than that, as one came to realize more and more
as time went on."
–Walter Brown, interview for Transistorized!
Walter Brown
 |
Walter Brown began working in Shockley's lab several years after the invention of the transistor—a time when the lab was extremely social. Coworkers often spent their weekends together going out at night, or picnicking during the day. Brown can still sing the song "Hells Bells Laboratory" that the researchers used to jokingly sing about life in the Shockley lab. Of course, the young men also worked pretty hard—Brown says that Shockley always demanded the best from his employees. Working at a time when Bell was fast and furiously trying to improve transistors, Brown helped the transistor along the road to its modern-day form.
Brown was born on October 11, 1924 in Charlottesville, Virginia. He began working at Bell Labs in 1950, just after he finished his Ph.D. in physics at Harvard. The company seems to have suited him—he has been there ever since.
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"The legacy at the moment is that we now are living in an era in which absolutely everything that we do is influenced by the availability of integrated circuits, which have come out of that first invention, with many other inventions inbetween. But now, when you have 40,000,000 transistors per human, or something like that, in the world, you have really changed the way in which we do things. The whole of the computer revolution, the whole of our current telecommunications modes, are all influenced—really determined by, dominated by—the integrated circuit that came out of the original transistors." |
Walter Brown sings "Hell's Bells Laboratory,"
by Ian Mackentosh:
"We've traveled a
long way to bring you this song,
A brand new calypso we're sure to get wrong,
About the reform school to which we belong,
It's the Hell's Bells Laboratory.
It's the Hell's bells and buckets of blood at the Hell's Bells Laboratory.
Our silocon's grown at low temperature,
The crystals resulting are not very pure,
We preserve all our lifetimes by using manure at the Hell's Bells Laboratory.
It's the Hell's bells and buckets of blood at the Hell's Bells Laboratory.
Publication of papers will help
your career,
Promotions assured if you write twenty a year,
They are used in the washroom of the chief engineer at
the Hell's Bells Laboratory.
It's the Hell's bells and buckets of blood at the Hell's Bells Laboratory.
The economy squeezes pinch more
every day,
Coffee and tea breaks have been taken away,
They are hoping to make the transistor pay at the Hell's Bells Laboratory.
It's the Hell's bells and buckets of blood at the Hell's Bells Laboratory.
Our walls are all graced by the
periodic chart,
Bill Shockley's picture is sewn over our hearts,
Bardeen and Brattain are our sweethearts at the Hells Bells
Laboratory.
It's the Hell's bells and buckets of blood at the Hell's Bells Laboratory.
Dislocations and traps are the bane
of our life,
Imperfections can cause you trouble and strife,
But we pick them all out with our scout master's knife at the Hell's
Bells Laboratory.
It's the Hell's bells and buckets of blood at the Hell's Bells Laboratory."
Resources:
-- American Men and Women of Science
-- Walter Brown, interview for "Transistorized!"
Copyright 1999, ScienCentral, Inc, and The American Institute of Physics. No portion of this web site may be reproduced without written permission. All Rights Reserved.