75 years ago the transistor was invented

People who are not familiar with electronic technology will not understand the importance of this fact, but they surely will if we explain to them that the transistor is the basic component of all integrated circuits that we use today.

Integrated circuits have tens of millions of transistors inside, and with each passing day these transistors become smaller, and therefore more transistors can be placed in new integrated circuit designs (the famous chips), giving them greater calculation capabilities.

Our lives would be very different if the transistor had not been invented, and subsequently the ability to make it smaller and smaller. We would not have at our disposal all the electronic devices that we use today.

I finished my studies as a Telecommunications Engineer more than 45 years ago, and although technology has not stopped evolving, and is doing so faster every time, at the base of all electronic components is the humble transistor that has given rise to all this .

In December 1947, this component was presented at Bell Laboratories and I am sure that no one could have had any idea of the future evolution that the device was going to have.

This is how things often happen in history. At certain moments, certain milestones arise that end up changing that story.

In the following video you can see one of the first “devices” in which a transistor was used, and you get an idea of its size: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_Djmfspr7E

It only remains to thank its three inventors, who 9 years later (in 1956) won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and to wish the humble transistor a long life, which still has many years of glory to come.