Comment by russellbeattie

3 years ago

Reading about the history of the transistor, it's truly amazing that AT&T basically just gave the technology away to the world for a single $25k licensing fee. Nominally, they were hoping to benefit from other company's innovations, but mostly they were worried about protecting their government sanctioned monopoly and didn't want to be seen as abusing it. That last bit isn't mentioned in most online summaries, but was an actual decision made at the highest levels of the company. So as long as you weren't in a communist nation, you could license the tech, including a nine-day long seminar on the details, and another a year later detailing the manufacturing process. [1]

In Europe, there was an independently developed point-transfer transistor called the Transitron created by a couple German physicists, and developed as an amplifier by a Westinghouse subsidiary in France. But the Bell Labs bipolar junction transistor was more advanced and based on a better understanding of the underlying effect. (Shockley was a paranoid asshole, but he was also a very capable scientist.)

Imagine if the US had a monopoly on transistor technology for a decade or so? No flood of cheaper Japanese electronics, no competitors for the microchip, etc. It's truly an astounding gift, or massive blunder depending on your point of view.