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benches they tried to force electric current into the germanium through liquid metals and
then through soldered wire contact points. Most of November and much of December 1947
were consumed with these tests.
They found that the contact points workedsort of. A strong current could be forced
through the germanium to a metal base on the other side. But rather than amplifying a signal
(making it stronger), it actually consumed energy (made it weaker).
Then Bardeen noticed something odd and unexpected. He accidentally misconnected
his electrical leads, sending a micro-current to the germanium contact point. When a very
weak current was trickled through from wire solder point to base, it created a hole in the
germaniums resistance to current flow. A weak current converted the semiconductor into a
superconductor.
Bardeen had to repeatedly demonstrate the phenomenon to convince both himself and
his teammates that his amazing results werent fluke occurrences. Time after time the results were the same with any semiconductor material they tried: high current, high resistance; low current, virtually no resistance.
Bardeen named the phenomenon transfer resistors, or transistors. It provided engineers with a way to both rectify a weak signal and boost it to many times its original
strength. Transistors required only 1/50 the space of a vacuum tube and 1/1,000,000 the
power and could outperform vacuum tubes. For this discovery, the three men shared the
1956 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Fun Facts: The first transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, hit the market
on October 18, 1954. It cost $49.95 (the equivalent of $361 in 2005 dollars!). It wasnt until the late 1960s that transistor radios became cheap
enough for everyone to afford one.

More to Explore
Aaseng, Nathan. American Profiles: Twentieth-Century Inventors. New York: Facts
on File, 1991.
. The Inventors: Nobel Prizes in Chemistry. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner, 1988.
Hoddeson, Lillian. True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen. Washington,
DC: National Academy Press, 2005.
Olney, Ross. Amazing Transistor: Key to the Computer Age. New York: Simon &
Schuster Childrens, 1998.
Phelan, Glen. Flowing Currents: The Quest to Build Tiny Transistors. Washington,
DC: National Geographic Society, 2006.
Riordan, Michael. Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1997.

The Big Bang

Year of Discovery: 1948
What Is It? The universe began with the giant explosion of an infinitely dense,
atom-sized point of matter.
Who Discovered It? George Gamow

Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?

The study of our history and origins is critical to understanding who we are. That includes the history of humans, of life on our planet, of our planet itself, and of the universe as a
whole. But how can anyone study a history that came and went unseen billions of years ago?
Gamows work represents the first serious attempt to create a scientific, rational description of the beginning of our universe. It was Gamow who named that moment of explosive birth the Big Bang, a name still used today. Gamow was able to mathematically
re-create the conditions of the universe billions of years ago and to describe how those initial conditions led to the present universe we can see and measure. His discoveries began
scientific study of the ancient past.

How Was It Discovered?

In 1926 Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expandinggrowing larger.
That discovery made scientists wonder what the universe looked like in the past. Has it always been expanding? How small did it used to be? Was there some moment when the universe began? What did it look like way back then?
Some began to speculate about when and how the universe began. In 1927 Georges
Lemaitre proposed that Hubbles discovery meant that at some distant point in the past, the
entire universe had been compressed into a single infinitely dense atom of matter. He called
it the cosmic egg. By 1930 a few scientists had attempted to describe this cosmic egg
and how it exploded to create our universes ongoing expansion.
George Gamow was born in 1904 in Odessa, Ukraine. As a young astronomy student,
Gamow was known as much for his practical jokes and late-night parties as for his science.
Still, by 1934 he had immigrated to America and secured a professorship of theoretical
physics at George Washington University in Washington, DC. It was there that Gamow first
heard of the cosmic egg concept. The problem with this theory was that there was no science, no data, no numerical studies to back it up.

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