Walter Brattain

The cattle came first. Walter Brattain was born in Amoy, on the Chinese coast, where his father taught at a private school for Chinese boys, and he was back in Washington state before he was two. In 1911 the family settled on a cattle ranch near Tonasket, and he spent his adolescence herding stock in the dry country east of the Cascades. He said later that the hard work was what decided him on physics. At Whitman College he took a double major in physics and mathematics, graduating in 1924, then a master's at Oregon and a doctorate at Minnesota in 1929, where he studied the new quantum mechanics under John Van Vleck.

He joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in August 1929 and spent 38 years there on the surfaces of solids. In 1945 the labs put him in a new solid-state group with the theorist John Bardeen, under William Shockley. Bardeen worked out that electrons trapped in surface states were blocking the effect Shockley predicted. Brattain built the apparatus that tested him. On December 16, 1947, two gold contacts a fraction of a millimeter apart on a slab of germanium amplified a signal. A transistor switches and amplifies current with no moving parts and almost no power. Everything since runs on that.

Shockley was not at the bench that afternoon, and the patent Bell Labs filed on the point-contact transistor named Bardeen and Brattain, not him. He was angry about it. Within weeks he had gone off and worked out the junction transistor on his own, a better device that took years to build and that he patented alone. What followed is documented rather than alleged: Shockley said he deserved the credit for the transistor outright, and he kept Bardeen and Brattain away from the new work. Brattain asked to be moved to another research group and got it. Bardeen called it an intolerable situation and left for the University of Illinois in 1951, where he later won a second Nobel Prize. Shockley left in 1953. The team that made the century's most consequential invention did not last four years.

He stayed at Bell Labs 11 more years after the prize, working on semiconductor surfaces and later on the electrochemistry of living tissue — blood clotting interested him after his son needed heart surgery. He retired in 1967, went home to Whitman College, and taught there until 1976. Of the award he said that much of his good fortune came from being in the right place at the right time, with the right people to work with. He died of Alzheimer's disease in a Seattle nursing home on October 13, 1987, and is buried in Pomeroy, Washington. His is the name that fades first off the 1956 prize. It does not appear to have troubled him.

Walter Brattain's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Integral-drive magnetometer head patent
  Out of the wartime work on finding submarines by the dents they make in the Earth's magnetic field 1944
• The point-contact transistor invention
  Built with John Bardeen. Two gold contacts on germanium, working on the bench on December 16 1947
• Three-electrode circuit element utilizing semiconductive materials patent
  The point-contact transistor patent, filed in 1948 in the names of Bardeen and Brattain 1950
• The photo-effect at the free surface of a semiconductor discovery
  From his prewar studies of cuprous oxide and silicon. The Nobel Committee counted it among his chief contributions —

• February 10, 1902 aged 0 Born in Amoy, China, to American parents His father Ross taught at the Ting-Wen Institute, a private school for Chinese boys. Mother and baby returned to the United States the following year.
• 1911 aged ~9 The family settles on a cattle ranch near Tonasket, Washington After several years in Spokane. He herded cattle through his school years and said the work was what sent him to physics.
• 1924 aged ~22 Graduates from Whitman College in physics and mathematics He and three classmates, all of whom became physicists, were later called the four horsemen of physics.
• August 1929 aged 27 Joins Bell Telephone Laboratories as a research physicist He had just finished his doctorate at Minnesota and a year at the National Bureau of Standards. He stayed at Bell Labs until 1967.
• 1944 aged ~42 Patents a magnetometer head built to detect submarines War work for the National Defense Research Committee at Columbia, running in parallel with Shockley's.
• December 16, 1947 aged 45 Two gold contacts on a germanium slab amplify a signal Brattain devised the geometry and ran the apparatus. Bardeen supplied the theory of surface states that told them where to look. Shockley was not there.
• December 23, 1947 aged 45 The transistor is demonstrated to Bell Labs management Bell Labs announced it publicly at a press conference on June 30, 1948, and licensed it openly rather than let it be classified.
• December 10, 1956 aged 54 Shares the Nobel Prize in Physics with Bardeen and Shockley Bardeen and Brattain cited for the point-contact transistor, Shockley for the junction transistor. Brattain's lecture was on the surface properties of semiconductors.
• October 13, 1987 aged 85 Dies in Seattle at 85 Of Alzheimer's disease, in a nursing home. He is buried in the City Cemetery at Pomeroy, Washington.

• John Bardeen 1908–1991
  Only person to win two Nobel Prizes in Physics, for the transistor and superconductivity theory. co-invented with
• William Shockley 1910–1989
  Co-inventor of the transistor at Bell Labs, earning the Nobel Prize and launching the semiconductor age. supervised by
• Robert Noyce 1927–1990
  Co-inventor of the integrated circuit and co-founder of Intel, earning him the title Mayor of Silicon Valley. built on his work
• Jack Kilby 1923–2005
  Co-inventor of the integrated circuit, a foundational innovation that made modern electronics possible. built on his work
• Gordon Moore 1929–2023
  Co-founder of Intel whose observation became Moore's Law, driving decades of semiconductor progress. built on his work