11 ms·
The Transistor, Part 1: Groping in the Dark
- cptaj 9y agoI really wish this was a podcast. I always digest my history in podcast form
- tantalor 9y agohttps://www.narro.co/ https://www.narro.co/
- jsjohnst 9y agoWhile I respect those who feel different like you, personally I’m glad it’s not. I retain significantly more knowledge from things I read vs things I heard. To fully benefit from audio content, I have to dedicate 100% of my focus to it otherwise I miss critical parts.
- dingo_bat 9y agoI'm like this and it makes me sad because podcasts are 100% useless for me.
- searine 9y agoI love science history. Probably my favorite non-fiction topic to read.
- davidw 9y agoThis is pretty much the perfect Hacker News article - interesting and informative.
- madengr 9y agoYou’d probably like Invention and Technology magazine. It ceased publication several years ago, but it was awesome. Great reading if you can find old issues. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Heritage_of_Invention_%26_Technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Heritage_of_Inventi...
- nitrogen 9y agoIt would be kind of fun to have a publishing company that would reprint and send out curated old issues of classic magazines to the nostalgia seekers of the world.
- Animats 9y agoYes, this is a classic story. Crystal diodes were known prior to WWII, and produced in bulk during WWII for radar systems. That resulted in commercial crystal growing technology. Bell Labs and Western Electric did much of that, so the technology for making crystals with controlled properties was coming along. That's the first step in the process of making transistors and ICs. The first big technology that really required theory and heavy math was AC power. That's what Tesla was noted for. DC you can do with ordinary arithmetic, but AC rotary machine design requires calculus. That was a big shock to engineers of the era. Edison never made that transition. Up until the early 20th century, science and engineering didn't talk much.
- WalterBright 9y agoEdison was notably deficient in math. But he recognized this and hired mathematicians to work for him. Even Einstein got help with the math on general relativity.
- gdubs 9y agoTensor calculus specifically, but Einstein was no slouch when it came to math.
- mannykannot 9y agoThat apparently did not stop Edison from making a number of bogus arguments to protect his investment in DC power.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> Up until the early 20th century, science and engineering didn't talk much Leonardo da Vinci?
- JetSpiegel 9y agoThe exception that confirms the rule. One person in millenia counts as "didn't talk much" in my book.
- WalterBright 9y agoI had a crystal radio in the 60's. It was nothing more than an antenna, a coil, headphones, and of course the crystal. I had fooled around with making electromagnets and morse keys, and understood them. But the crystal completely baffled me.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoI had one of those as a kid. The idea you could listen to the radio without any local power source (mains or batteries) was pretty amazing.
- madengr 9y agoI built one, and it said “connect it to a pipe”. I had a piece of pipe in my room, and it frustratingly did nothing. They never said “an earth connected pipe. Now I’m an RF engineer; go figure.
- WalterBright 9y agoI discovered that if you connected a long wire to the phono inputs on an amplifier, you'd pick up the local AM stations.
- ggm 9y agoI wish Robert Buderi's book on radar was available in e-print because it's really good as an overview of the relationship of the war, O/R, technology and specifically the transistor.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoThere's a pretty good PBS doc about Shockley and Noyce (mostly Noyce) called Silicon Valley. https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B00BD7MBK6/ref=pd_cbs_318_2 https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B00BD7MBK6/ref=pd_cbs...
- madengr 9y agoReading Tesla’s Colorado Springs Lab Notes, he spent a good deal of time trying to develop an efficient RF rectifier/detector. So while he could generate huge amounts of RF, he could not detect it well.