History of the transistor

Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed the first patent for a transistor in Canada in 1925, describing a device similar to a Field Effect Transistor or "FET".However, Lilienfeld did not publish any research articles about his devices,[citation needed] and in 1934, German inventor Oskar Heil patented a similar device.
In 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at AT&T's Bell Labs in the United States observed that when electrical contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, the output power was larger than the input. Solid State Physics Group leader William Shockley saw the potential in this, and over the next few months worked to greatly expand the knowledge of semiconductors, and thus could be described as the "father of the transistor". The term was coined by John R. Pierce.According to physicist/historian Robert Arns, legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that William Shockley and Gerald Pearson had built operational versions from Lilienfeld's patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles.
The first silicon transistor was produced by Texas Instruments in 1954.This was the work of Gordon Teal, an expert in growing crystals of high purity, who had previously worked at Bell Labs.The first MOS transistor actually built was by Kahng and Atalla at Bell Labs in 1960.