After the end of World War II, Mervin Kelly put together a team of scientists to develop a solid-state semiconductor switch to replace the problematic vacuum tube.  The team would use some of the advances in semiconductor research during the war that had made radar possible.  A young, brilliant theoretician, Bill Shockley, was selected as the team leader.  Shockley drafted Bell Lab's Walter Brattain, an experimental physicist who could build or fix just about anything, and hired theoretical physicist John Bardeen from the University of Minnesota.  Shockley filled out his team with an eclectic mix of physicists, chemists and engineers.  Brown, a physicist who joined the group in 1951, recalls hearing about exuberant parties and good lunches.  Betty Sparks, Shockley's secretary, recalled the group's high spirits at her wedding to Morgan Sparks.  They called their lab "Hell's Bells Laboratory."  In the spring of 1945, Shockley designed what he hoped would be the first semiconductor amplifier, relying on something called the "field effect."  His device was a small cylinder coated thinly with silicon, mounted close to a small, metal plate.  Ensconced in Bell Labs' Murray Hill facilities, Bardeen and Brattain began a great partnership.  Bardeen, the theoretician, suggested experiments and interpreted the results, while Brattain built and ran the experiments.  Technician Phil Foy recalls that as time went on with little success, tensions began to build within the lab group.  In the fall of 1947, author Lillian Hoddeson says, Brattain decided to try dunking the entire apparatus into a tub of water.  Surprisingly, it worked . . . a little bit.  Brattain began to experiment with gold on germanium, eliminating the liquid layer on the theory that it was slowing down the device.  It didn't work, but the team kept experimenting using that design as a starting point.  Shortly before Christmas, Bardeen had an historic insight.  Everyone thought they knew how electrons behaved in crystals, but Bardeen discovered they were wrong.  The electrons formed a barrier on the surface.  His breakthrough was what they needed.  Without telling Shockley about the changes they were making to the investigation, Bardeen and Brattain worked on.  On December 16, 1947, they built the point-contact transistor, made from strips of gold foil on a plastic triangle, pushed down into contact with a slab of germanium.  When Bardeen and Brattain called Shockley to tell him of the invention, Shockley was both pleased at the group's results and furious that he had not been directly involved.  He decided that to preserve his standing, he would have to do Bardeen and Brattain one better.  His device, the junction (sandwich) transistor, was developed in a burst of creativity and anger, mostly in a hotel room in Chicago.  It took him a total of four weeks of working pen on paper, although it took another two years before he could actually build one.  His device was more rugged and more practical than Bardeen and Brattain's point-contact transistor, and much easier to manufacture.  It became the central artifact of the electronic age.  Bell Labs decided to unveil the invention on June 30, 1948.  With the help of engineer John Pierce, who wrote science fiction in his spare time, Bell Labs settled on the name "transistor"-- combining the ideas of "trans-resistance" with the names of other devices like thermistors.  The invention got little attention at the time, either in the popular press or in industry.  But Shockley saw its potential.  He left Bell Labs to found Shockley Semiconductor in Palo Alto, California.  He hired superb engineers and physicists, but, according to physical chemist Harry Sello, Shockley's personality drove out eight of his best and brightest.  Those "traitorous eight" founded a new company called Fairchild Semiconductor.  Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, two of the eight, went on to form Intel Corporation.  They (and others at Texas Instruments) co-invented the integrated circuit.  Today, Intel produces billions of transistors daily on its integrated circuits, yet Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley earned very little money from their research.  Nonetheless, Shockley's company was the beginning of Silicon Valley.  https://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/index.html   

25 Eclectic Films Chosen for National Film Registry  Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced Dec. 14, 2022 the annual selection of 25 influential motion pictures to be inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.   Selected for their cultural, historic or aesthetic importance to preserve the nation’s film heritage, the newest selections include a vibrant diversity of American filmmakers, as well as landmark works in key genres and numerous documentaries.  The 2022 selections date back 124 years in filmmaking to an 1898 film of the “Mardi Gras Carnival” parade in New Orleans. The film was long thought to be lost but recently discovered in a museum in the Netherlands.  The most recent film now added to the registry is 2011’s “Pariah,” directed by Dee Rees.  This year’s selections include at least 15 films directed or co-directed by filmmakers of color, women or LGBTQ+ filmmakers.  The selections bring the number of films in the registry to 850, many of which are among the 1.7 million films in the Library’s collections.  Hollywood releases selected this year include Marvel Studios' “Iron Man,” Disney’s beloved “The Little Mermaid,” John Waters’ “Hairspray,” the unforgettable romantic comedy “When Harry Met Sally,” Brian De Palma’s adaptation of “Carrie,” and the 1950 film version of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” which made José Ferrer the first Hispanic actor to win an Oscar for Best Actor.  Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will host a television special Tuesday, Dec. 27, starting at 8 p.m. ET to screen a selection of motion pictures named to the registry this year.  Hayden will join TCM host, film historian and Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Director and President Jacqueline Stewart, who is chair of the National Film Preservation Board, to discuss the films.   

December 13, 2022  For what is now the seventh time in a row, Emily Temple presents the best book covers of the year—as chosen by some of the industry’s best book cover designers.  This year, 31 designers shared their favorite covers of the year, with a grand total of 103 covers, representing work by 62 different designers for 54 different imprints.  Their choices and their comments are at https://lithub.com/the-103-best-book-covers-of-2022   

Crowdfunding publisher Unbound has partnered with an AI platform to challenge people to use artificial intelligence to solve Cain’s Jawbone, a literary puzzle that has only ever been cracked by four people since it was published in the 1930s.  Cain’s Jawbone is a novel by Edward Powys Mathers, who was then the Observer’s cryptic crossword compiler.  It’s a murder mystery in which six people die, but it can only be solved if readers rearrange its 100 pages in the correct order.  Unbound said the pages could be sorted to reveal the six victims and their respective murderers “through logic and intelligent reading”.  The person or team that finishes the competition at the top of the leaderboard wins $300.  The contest opens on Dec. 15, 2022 and closes on 31 December.  Sarah Shaffi    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/dec/14/contest-challenges-ai-to-solve-legendary-literary-puzzle-cains-jawbone   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2606  December 16, 2022