In the beginning, there was the point-contact transistor. This was the very first transistor ever made, built by Walter Brattain with the help of John Bardeen. It was made of two gold foil ...

So What Was the Transistor Good For? Transistors may have been useful to the phone company and to a handful of scientists building computers, but that wasn't enough to build an industry.

Then in December, 1947, in a combination of brilliant theoretical insight and serendipitous accidents, Bardeen and Brattain produced the world’s first semiconductor amplifier—the point-contact ...