Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley had submitted the patent application for a "three-electrode circuit element ...

The future began 75 years ago this week with the invention of something small that’s considered the most manufactured item in human history. Odds are, you are surrounded by them right now. The ...

On Dec. 16, 1947, the future began with the invention of the transistor. A lab notebook indicates that researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories first got the thing to work on this day 75 years ago.

Modern humans have existed for around 300,000 years, and in all the time we've been here, we've made a lot of things. In the early days, homo sapiens fashioned tools from flint and other materials, ...

The telephone company had problems with vacuum tubes, too, and hoped to find something else to use for switching telephone calls. The idea of somehow using semiconductors (solid materials such as ...