The Age of the Amplifier

William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain, winners of the 1956 Nobel Prize for their work on the “transistor effect.” Via Wikipedia.As we’ve noted more than a few times before, for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US. As part of its ongoing efforts to provide universal telephone service, Bell Labs generated numerous world-changing inventions, and accumulated more Nobel Prizes than any other industrial research lab.1 But the most i...