True Genius The Life and Science of John Bardeen: The Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics (2002) / Chapter Skim
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9 The Break from Bell
9 The Break from Bell
Pages 142-164
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From page 142... ...
An unusually heavy snow began to fall on Friday, December 26. All staff members were sent home after more than a foot of snow had accumulated at Murray Hill.
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From page 143... ...
He had kept his work hidden from the semiconductor group. On Monday, December 28, Shockley ran his designs over to Murray Hill and got an experimentalist, Richard Haynes, to witness the documents.
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From page 144... ...
Bell Labs could not risk the rejection of a claim based on the already patented field effect idea. Bell therefore based its application on Bardeen and Brattain's bipolar design.
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From page 145... ...
So at the demonstration Shockley abruptly rose to present his design for a new type of bipolar amplifier based on pen junctions. The design resembled his New Year's Eve conception, except that it was an n-p-n rather than a p-n-p sandwich, in which electrons, rather than holes, carried most of the current.
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From page 146... ...
While they waited for that release, Bardeen and Brattain sent a letter about their invention to the Physical Review, asking the editor to hold back publication until Bell Labs had officially heard that the invention would not be classified. Again, Brattain had difficulty containing his impatience.
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From page 147... ...
He was smartly ciressec! in a tailored gray suit with a colorful bow tie.
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From page 148... ...
P ~ys~c~sts. Their spirits dampened, recalled Bardeen, when "we read the New York Times the next day" and found "they had just a few words in the radio column about it, and that's all." The Times reported that "a device called a transistor, which has several applications in radio where a vacuum tube ordinarily is employed, was demonstrated for the first time yesterday at Bell Telephone Laboratories.
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From page 149... ...
The earlier-generation vacuum tube hearing aids were large devices, usually worn around the waist or sometimes held in a pocket. Consumers were willing to pay the high cost of improving them.
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From page 150... ...
Shockley directed them to work on the surface effects of point-contact transistors, an area he "probably knew was a blind alley. " When Bardeen complained, Shockley proposed that Bardeen could go and work in development with lack Morton or in radio engineering with Russell Ohl, "but these solutions naturally did not appeal to me," Bardeen later wrote.
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From page 151... ...
Bardeen explained that Weinberg "has been in contact with me, first in regard to a permanent position at Oak Ridge which I turned down, and now in regard to spending a period of a year or so there on leave from the Laboratories. He makes a strong case for the latter." Bardeen understood that his position at Oak Ridge would be to "act as a senior advisor for the solid-state group." His contributions "would be connected with fundamental investigations into the properties of matter subjected to nuclear bombardment." Bardeen asked Fisk, "What do you think of the proposition?
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From page 152... ...
One day, while attending a meeting of the American Physical Society in New York, he "stopped in at a luggage store there, and had them make me to order there a suitcase so big that I could put 3 x 5 cards in. " The box served Herring until the personal computer took over its function in the 1970s.
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From page 153... ...
When the family went out to dinner at the William Pitt in Chatham, the men wore pansies in their lapels; Betsy wore a pansy corsage. In January 1949, John took nine-year-old Jimmy skating.
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From page 154... ...
Bardeen had not thought extensively about superconductivity since 1941, but when he pulled out his decade-old notes it felt like coming home. In his prewar study of superconductivity, Bardeen had come to focus on the energy gap in the electronic structure of superconducting materials, a notion highlighted in the work of the London brothers.
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From page 155... ...
They were available as a consequence of the wartime atomic bomb program. Emanuel Maxwell, then working at the National Bureau of Standards, had independently found the isotope effect studying isotopes from Los Alamos.
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From page 156... ...
When Frohlich learned about the confirming experimental results a day or two after they appeared in the Physical Review, he promptly sent a letter to the Proceedings of the Royal Society to claim priority. The competition between Frohlich and Bardeen was on.
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From page 157... ...
On one bright moment in this otherwise gloomy period they learned that the patent for the point-contact transistor had finally been approved. Bardeen had been concerned that it might not be, for the discovery of the Lilienfeld patents had brought rejection to two of the four transistor patent applications (the ones concerning the Brattain-Gibney-Bardeen field effect work in November 1947~.
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From page 158... ...
It's the kind of place I'd like to be at." With the help of Coleman Griffith, the provost of the university, Everitt pieced together parts of budgets and arranged a joint position for Bardeen, half in physics, half in electrical engineering. The offer included support for an applied group in engineering.
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From page 159... ...
" Bardeen leaned toward accepting when both physics and electrical engineering assured him that his work would be selfdirected. Late in March 1951, Bell Labs complicated Bardeen's decision by finally taking some steps to improve his situation there.
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From page 160... ...
Bardeen accepted the Illinois offer in a telegram sent on April 28. His initial salary of $10,000 would tee evenly split between the physics and electrical engineering departments.
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From page 161... ...
Each time Bardeen tried to go over Shockley's head and gain entry into the research on the junction transistor, he had been rebuffed. Shockley "was well aware of the situation, " wrote Bardeen; it "was a deliberate policy." Bardeen explained that he was in an "intolerable" position in which he "could not contribute to the experimental program unless he wanted to work in direct competition with my supervisor." Alluding to his Oak Ridge offer in the spring of 1949 Bardeen told Kelly, "I seriously considered leaving the Laboratories about two years ago under much less favorable circumstances." Bardeen also told how his "intolerable" working conditions grew even worse after he decided to work on superconductivity, a new direction he had "discussed at the time with Fisk." Given the lack of support for his work on superconductivity, Bardeen explained that he "felt somewhat isolated." But even if there were experimental work on superconductivity going on at Bell, "I feel that I can work on superconductivity more effectively in a university.
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From page 162... ...
She had helped him work out a theory of productivity and creativity based on wartime theories of operations research and current theories of psychology. Bill and Emmy developed a close emotional and intellectual relationship in a time when Shockley's marriage to lean (then suffering from uterine cancer)
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From page 163... ...
"He just got on the phone and began talking to people up and down the coast," recalled Fred. The Seitz's teenaged son enjoyed the visit, for Bill "would amuse lack with his sleight of hand tricks." Seitz recalled that during one of Shockley's countless telephone calls, he completed a deal with the wealthy chemist Arnold Beckman, who agreed to fund the new company that became Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.
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From page 164... ...
John particularly enjoyed seeing Wigner, who visited Madison that summer. At the University of Wisconsin, Bardeen taught his first formal course on the electrical properties of solids.
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