Lillian Hoddeson is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor of History of Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the coauthor of Crystal Fire.
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On December 16, 1947, two physicists at Bell Laboratories, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, jabbed two electrodes into a sliver of germanium half an inch long. The electrical power coming out of that piece of germanium was 100 times stronger than what we... SEE MORE