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 ...

Kevin Aylesworth is a Senior Program Officer at the National Research Council. Although his job these days revolves around science policy rather than building things in the lab, Aylesworth—an ...

Also called a "bipolar junction transistor" (BJT), it is one of two major transistor categories; the other is "field-effect transistor" (FET). Although the first transistor was bipolar and the ...