+

HISTORY

INVENTION AND INVENTORS: In Paris,

shortly after World War II, two German
scientists, Herbert Mataré [left] and
Heinrich Welker, invented the “tran-
sistron,” a solid-state amplifier remark-
ably similar to the transistor developed
by Bell Telephone Laboratories at about
the same time. In this X-ray image of
a commercial transistron built in the
early 1950s, two closely spaced metal
point contacts, one from each end, touch
the surface of a germanium sliver. A third
electrode contacts the other side of the
sliver. Mataré is now retired and living
in Malibu, Calif.

HOW EUROPE
MISSED THE
TRANSISTOR
The most important invention of the 20th century
was conceived not just once, but twice
BY MICHAEL RIORDAN

www.spectrum.ieee.org November 2005 | IEEE Spectrum | INT 47

 At the time, German radar systems operated at wavelengths as those made of silicon, which seemed best suited for microwave
short as half a meter. But the systems could not work at shorter reception. But the Allied bombing of Berlin was making life exceed-
wavelengths, which would have been better able to discern smaller ingly difficult for Telefunken researchers. “I spent many hours in
targets, like enemy aircraft. The problem was that the vacuum- subway stations during bomb attacks,” he wrote in an unpublished
tube diodes that rectified current in the early radar receivers could memoir. So in January 1944, the company shifted much of its radar
not function at the high frequencies involved. Their dimensions— research to Breslau in Silesia (now Wroclaw, Poland). Mataré worked
especially the gap between the diode’s anode and cathode—were in an old convent in nearby Leubus.
too large to cope with ultrashort, high-frequency waves. As a pos- Laboring full-time to get silicon rectifiers into production,
sible substitute, Mataré began experimenting on his own with Mataré had scant opportunity to work on reducing the oscillator
solid-state crystal rectifiers similar to the “cat’s-whisker” detec- noise in radar receivers—an outgrowth of his doctoral disserta-
tors he had tinkered with as a teenager. tion. But he did manage to build and study an intriguing new
During the 1920s, he built crystal radio sets to listen to classi- device, the crystal “duodiode,” in which two closely spaced metal
cal music on the radio waves then beginning to fill the ether. Of points contact the semiconductor surface, forming two adjacent
Belgian extraction, he was raised in Aachen, Germany, in a family crystal rectifiers. If they possess the same resistance and capac-
Herbert Heinrich immersed in music. At the heart of each of his radios was a tiny itance, these two rectifiers can be used in a special circuit to
Mataré, Welker, chip of semiconductor material, such as galena (lead sulfide) or sili- cancel out noise from the oscillator of a superheterodyne mixer.
1946 1970 con, with a fragile wire jabbed gingerly into its surface. For reasons The noise through one rectifier adds to the overall signal trans-
TRANSISTOR TWIN: The cross-section nobody fully understood until the late 1930s, this detector rectified mitted by the mixer, and the noise through the other rectifier
drawing [right] from the French maga- the alternating-current signal from the antenna into the direct- subtracts from that signal. But to ensure identical electrical char-
zine Toute la Radio depicts the inside
of a commercial Westinghouse tran-
current signal needed to drive headphones. acteristics, the points must be extremely close—far less than a
sistron [above center]. In the drawing, Similar point-contact devices, especially those made with sil- millimeter apart—so that both contact the same tiny crystal grain
the two metal points (chercheurs) con- icon, could be used as the rectifier required in the superheterodyne on the surface of the semiconductor.
tact the surface of a germanium sliver
(cristal). A technician adjusted the mixer circuit of a radar receiver, which shifts the received fre- Mataré worked with silicon samples provided by physicist Karl
positions of the two contacts to give GETTING TO THE POINT: After John quencies down by mixing the input signal with the output of an Seiler in Breslau and germanium samples from a Luftwaffe research
the proper electrical characteristics Bardeen and Walter Brattain invented
the point-contact transistor in internal oscillator. Because the electrical action of such a crystal team near Munich that included Welker, his future co-worker.
while viewing them through a window
(fenêtre). The internal structure is December 1947, Bell Telephone rectifier is confined to a very small, almost microscopic region on Although silicon worked better for radar receivers because it rec-
Laboratories quickly began producing
similar to Bell Labs’ first prototype
its Type A transistor. In the picture
the semiconductor surface, the device can rectify currents at rela- tified at higher frequencies, germanium duodiodes exhibited
point-contact transistor [far right],
produced in 1948. above, two metal points, called the tively high frequencies. intriguing behavior. When the two points touched the surface less
emitter and the collector, contact Theoretical work by Walther Schottky at Siemens AG, in Munich, than 100 micrometers apart, Mataré claims, he occasionally noticed
the surface of a germanium sliver,
which has a third contact known Germany, and by Nevill F. Mott at the University of Bristol, in that by varying the voltage on one he could influence the current
as the base attached to its back side. England, had given Mataré and other radar researchers a much better through the other—a phenomenon he dubbed “interference.” It
understanding of what was happening beneath the sharp metal point. seemed as if one of his points could affect a region extending far
When the point touched the semiconductor surface, excess elec- beyond the narrow barrier layer predicted by Schottky’s theory.
shortly after Bell Telephone risen from the still-smoldering ashes of the devastation. trons quickly flowed into it, leaving behind a neutral “barrier layer” Mataré had stumbled upon a method to influence this layer,
IN LATE 1948, Laboratories had announced “This PTT bunch in Paris seems very good to me,” Holden can- less than a micrometer deep in the material just underneath it. This which had stubbornly blocked earlier attempts to make a solid-state

THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: HERBERT MATARÉ; DR. ANDREW WYLIE; SIEMENS AG; MICHAEL RIORDAN/BELL LABS; ARMAND VAN DORMAEL
the invention of the transistor, surprising reports began coming didly admitted in his letter. “They have little groups in all sorts of narrow zone then acted like an asymmetric barrier to the further amplifier. But wartime urgencies kept him from pursuing this
in from Europe. Two physicists from the German radar program, rat holes, farm houses, cheese factories, and jails in the Paris sub- flow of electrons. They could jump the barrier much more readily intriguing possibility much further.
Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker, claimed to have invented urbs. They are all young and eager.” And one of these small, aggres- from the semiconductor surface to the metal point than vice versa, Germany’s eastern front collapsed in January 1945, and the Russian
a strikingly similar semiconductor device, which they called the sive research groups, holed up in a converted house in the nearby in effect restricting current flow to one direction. Army was swiftly approaching Breslau. The Telefunken lab in Leubus
transistron, while working at a Westinghouse subsidiary in Paris. village of Aulnay-sous-Bois, had apparently come through spec- As the war ground on, the leaders of the Berlin-based German was hastily abandoned, and all of Mataré’s lab books and records were

PRECEDING PAGES: LEFT: DEVICE COURTESY DR. ANDREW WYLIE, PHOTO: GUSTO IMAGES; RIGHT: ANDREAS TEICHMANN
The resemblance between the two awkward contraptions was tacularly with what might well be the invention of the century— radar establishment urged the Luftwaffe to pursue research on sys- burned to keep them out of enemy hands. The group attempted to
uncanny. In fact, they were almost identical! Just like the revo- a semiconducting device that would spawn a massive new global tems operating at wavelengths well below 50 centimeters—in what reconstitute its R&D program in central Germany, but the U.S. Army
lutionary Bell Labs device, dubbed the point-contact transistor, industry of incalculable value. Or had it? we now call the microwave range. They argued that such systems terminated this effort when it swept through in April 1945, merci-
the transistron featured two closely spaced metal points poking would be small enough to mount in warplanes and detect approach- fully sending Mataré home to rejoin his family in nearby Kassel.
into the surface of a narrow germanium sliver. The news from As was true for the Bell Labs transistor, invented by ing enemy aircraft through dense clouds and fog.
Paris was particularly troubling at Bell Labs, for its initial attempts John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain in December 1947, the tech- But German military leaders, basking smugly in their early vic- Mataré’s future colleague Welker wasn’t spared the indig-
to manufacture such a delicate gizmo were then running into nology that led to the transistron emerged from wartime research tories, ignored those pleas. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring, who nities of war, either. Allied bombs destroyed his laboratory near
severe difficulties with noise, stability, and uniformity. on semiconductor materials, which were sorely needed in radar had served as an open-cockpit fighter pilot in World War I, Munich in October 1944. Early the following year, this theoretical
So in May 1949, Bell Labs researcher Alan Holden made a sor- receivers. In the European case, it was the German radar pro- adamantly believed that the intrinsic fighting abilities of his Aryan physicist, who during the 1930s had worked on the quantum mechan-
tie to Paris while visiting England, to snoop around the city and gram that spawned the invention. Both Mataré and Welker played warriors made electronic systems superfluous. “My pilots,” he ics of electrons in metals, began speculating about how to use sili-
see the purported invention for himself. “This business of the crucial roles in this crash R&D program, working at different ends bragged, “do not need a cinema on board!” con and germanium to fabricate a solid-state amplifier.
French transistors would be hard to unravel, i.e., whether they of the war-torn country. Everything changed after February 1943, however, when a British These two elements were widely regarded as metals during the
developed them independently,” he confided in a 14 May letter Mataré [see photo in “Transistor Twin”], who shared his remem- Sterling bomber downed over Rotterdam in the Netherlands revealed 1930s, but their apparent metallic behavior was due largely to
to William B. Shockley, leader of the Bell Labs solid-state physics brances from his home in Malibu, Calif., joined the German research how far behind the Allies Germany had fallen in radar technology. the high level of impurities in the available samples. When for-
group. “As we arrived, they were transmitting to a little portable effort in September 1939, just as Hitler’s mighty army rumbled across Göring ordered a thorough analysis of the bomber’s 9-cm radar sys- eign atoms of elements in the fifth column of the periodic table—
radio receiver outdoors from a transmitter indoors, which they Poland. Having received the equivalent of a master’s degree in applied tem and recalled more than a thousand scientists, engineers, and arsenic and phosphorus, for example—become lodged in the tetra-
said was modulated by a transistor.” physics from Aachen Technical University, he began doing radar technicians from the front in a desperate attempt to catch up. By hedral crystal structure of silicon or germanium, four of their five
Four days later, France’s Secretary of Postes, Télégraphes et research at Telefunken AG’s labs in Berlin. There he developed tech- summer they had built a working prototype, but it was much too outermost electrons form strong bonds with nearby atoms, but
Téléphones (PTT), the ministry funding Mataré and Welker’s niques to suppress noise in superheterodyne mixers, which convert late. Allied bombers, aided by onboard radar systems that allowed the fifth is easily knocked away and can thus transfer current
research, announced the invention of the transistron to the French the high-frequency radar signals rebounding from radar targets into pilots to operate even in foul weather, were pulverizing German cities through the crystal. The much-higher-purity silicon and ger-
press, lauding the pair’s achievement as a “brilliante réalisation lower-frequency signals that can be manipulated more easily in elec- with increasing impunity. manium that researchers used to build radar systems during World
de la recherche française.” Only four years after World War II had tronic circuits. Based on this research, published in 1942, Mataré Mataré recalled the sudden urgency in an interview. He inten- War II had far fewer of such current carriers and behaved more
ended in Europe, a shining technological phoenix had miraculously earned his doctorate from the Technical University of Berlin. sified his previous R&D efforts on crystal rectifiers, particularly like semiconductors than like metals.

48 IEEE Spectrum | November 2005 | INT www.spectrum.ieee.org www.spectrum.ieee.org November 2005 | IEEE Spectrum | INT 49
 In early 1945, Welker, who was mastering the art of purifying ger- higher-grade material, Mataré finally got consistent amplification dubbed the “emitter”) travel easily within this layer over to the out- Düsseldorf Radio Fair. There a young, dark-haired woman demon-
manium, recognized that the two semiconductors could be used to in June 1948, six months after Bardeen and Brattain. Encouraged put electrode (or “collector”), markedly boosting the conductivity strated what was probably the world’s first transistor radio, built
make what we now call a field-effect transistor. In fact, the device by this success, they phoned PTT Secretary Eugène Thomas and beneath it and therefore the current flowing through it. around four Intermetall point-contact transistors [see photo,
he had in mind was strikingly similar to one that Shockley was to invited him over for a demonstration. But Thomas was apparently After the Bell Labs revelations, Mataré and Welker had little dif- “Tuning In”] more than a year before Texas Instruments Inc., in
suggest at Bell Labs a few months later. too busy—or perhaps not interested enough—to come by. ficulty getting the PTT minister to visit their lab. Thomas urged Dallas, publicly claimed that milestone for itself.
In this scheme, an electric field from a metal plate should pen- About that time, Welker put aside his theoretical work and tried them to apply for a French patent on their semiconductor triode; he But after Michael sold the firm to Clevite Corp., then in
etrate into a thin surface layer of a semiconductor strip beneath it, to analyze what was going on just beneath the shiny germanium also suggested they call it by a slightly different name: transistron. Cleveland, later that year, its focus shifted almost exclusively to pro-
ripping electrons loose from their parent atoms to serve as cur- surface of Mataré’s odd contraption. In an undated, handwritten So the two physicists hastily wrote up a patent disclosure and passed duction and away from research. Discouraged by that about-face,
rent carriers. A voltage applied across the semiconductor strip would document, now in the archives of Munich’s Deutsches Museum, it on to the Westinghouse lawyers. Mataré left Germany and immigrated to the United States, where
induce a current through it. Crucially, a varying voltage on the metal Welker speculated that one point—which he called the “électrode On 13 August, the company submitted a patent application for he found work in the U.S. semiconductor industry. Even today, at 93,
plate would modulate the current through the strip. Thus, small de commande,” or “control electrode”—was inducing strong elec- a “Nouveau système cristallin à plusieurs électrodes réalisant des effets the IEEE Life Fellow remains active, consulting from his Malibu home
input signals would result in large output currents flowing through tric fields in the germanium just beneath the other electrode, alter- de [sic] relais électroniques” to the Ministry of Industry and Com- on such projects as a large, innovative photovoltaic array built in
the strip. Or so Welker figured. ing the material’s conductivity there. merce. Its brief description of what might be happening inside the Southern California [see The Back Story, in this issue].
But tests he performed in March 1945 revealed no such ampli- But Mataré was not buying that explanation, which followed the germanium mostly followed Welker’s field-effect interpretation but
fication. In his logbook he recorded “only small effects,” orders of logic of Welker’s unsuccessful 1945 attempt at a semiconductor ampli- was probably influenced by Bardeen and Brattain’s explanations. What is arguably the most important invention of the
magnitude less than what was predicted by Schottky’s theory. fier. If the phenomenon were caused by an electric field, Mataré By the May 1949 press conference, the two Germans had the 20th century remarkably occurred twice—and independently. Given
Shockley, Brattain, and their Bell Labs colleagues attempted simi- remembers thinking, he should have witnessed a decrease in the cur- device [see X-ray image in “Invention and Inventors”] in limited the secrecy shrouding the Bell Labs device, there is no possibility
lar tests that very same spring, with similarly disappointing results. production and were beginning to ship units for use by the PTT as Mataré and Welker could have been influenced by knowledge of it
The failures soon led Bardeen to postulate a novel idea of “surface TUNING IN: At the amplifiers in the telephone system—initially in the line between before July 1948, when news of the revolutionary invention became
states”—that free electrons were somehow huddling on the semi- Düsseldorf Radio Fair in Paris and Limoges. Speaking to the Paris press, Thomas compared widespread. And it seems clear from the still-sketchy historical record
1953, the German firm
conductor surface, shielding out the field. This conjecture, and Intermetall unveiled what these devices with vacuum tubes and demonstrated their use in that they indeed had a working, reliable amplifier by that time.
Brattain’s follow-up experiments to determine the physical nature was probably the world’s radio receivers. Reporters hailed the two physicists as “les pères du This dual, nearly simultaneous breakthrough can be attributed
of the surface states, led to their invention of the point-contact first transistor radio, more transistron” (the fathers of the transistron). The French device “turns in part to the tremendous wartime advances in purifying silicon and,
than a year before Texas
transistor in December 1947—a month after they discovered how to Instruments claimed that out…to be superior to its American counterpart,” read a more meas- in particular, germanium. In both cases, germanium played the cru-
overcome the shielding. milestone. The radio’s ured but still favorable account in Toute la Radio, a technical jour- cial gateway role, for in the immediate postwar years it could be
amplifier circuit was built
After his failures, Welker returned to research on germanium around four point-contact nal [see drawing and photo in “Transistor Twin”]. “The latter has refined much more easily and with substantially higher purities than
and resumed the theoretical studies of superconductivity he had transistors made by a limited lifetime and appears to be fairly unstable, whereas the silicon. Such high-purity semiconductor material was absolutely
reluctantly abandoned during the war. In 1946, British and French Intermetall, which existing transistrons do not show any sign of fatigue.” essential for fabricating the first transistors.
Herbert Mataré
intelligence agents interrogated him about his involvement in and businessman According to Mataré, this superiority could be attributed to But the Bell Labs team had clear priority—and a superior phys-
German radar. They subsequently offered him an opportunity to Jakob Michael had the care they employed in fabricating their devices. While observ- ical understanding of how the electrons and holes were flowing
work in Paris in an R&D operation set up under the auspices of a founded in 1952. ing the process with microscopes, the women working on the inside germanium. That advantage proved critical to subsequent
Westinghouse subsidiary, Compagnie des Freins et Signaux Westing- small assembly line would measure current-voltage curves for achievements, such as Shockley’s junction transistor [see “The Lost
house. The immediate goal was to manufacture germanium recti- both metal points with oscilloscopes and fix the points rigidly on History of the Transistor,” IEEE Spectrum, May 2004], which was
fiers for telecommunications and military electronics. the germanium with drops of epoxy after the curves matched the much easier to mass-produce with high reliability and uniformity.
While teaching in Aachen at his alma mater in 1946, Mataré desired characteristics. When Brattain and Shockley visited the By the mid-1950s, nobody was trying to make point-contact tran-
was also interviewed by agents. Fluent in French, he received a sim- Paris group in 1950, Mataré showed them telephone amplifiers sistors any longer, and the industry was moving on to silicon.
ilar offer. He eagerly agreed to join the Paris effort, because doing made with his transistrons—which allowed him to place a call A factor crucial to success in the nascent semiconductor indus-
research in devastated, occupied Germany was almost impossible. rent at the second electrode, not the increase he observed on his all the way to Algiers. “That’s quite something,” admitted Shockley try was the sustained innovation that flourished at Bell Labs—as
oscilloscope. According to this field-effect idea, a positive poten- a bit guardedly, Mataré recalls half a century later. well as at Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor—lead-
Then in their mid-thirties, the two German physicists met tial on the control electrode would induce negative charges in the ing to silicon transistors and integrated circuits. And that required
in Paris and began organizing their operation. They found a vacant germanium under the other electrode, which should reinforce the But the French government and Westinghouse failed extensive infrastructure, both material and intellectual, to keep these
two-story stone house in the middle-class suburb of Aulnay-sous- current-blocking effects of the barrier layer there. to capitalize on the technical advantages in semiconductors that companies at the frontiers of this fast-moving field. Such an infra-
Bois, just northwest of the city. In its basement, Welker set up his Mataré argued instead that the control electrode must be inject- they then appeared to have. After Hiroshima, nuclear physics had structure already existed in the United States after World War II
equipment to purify and crystallize germanium. Mataré’s testing ing positive charges, called holes, into the germanium. And per- emerged as the dominant scientific discipline in the public mind, because of its wartime radar efforts. But France had no comparable
and measurements laboratory went on the ground floor, where later haps by trickling along the boundary between two crystal grains, and nuclear power was widely heralded as the wave of the future. infrastructure and had to import talent from occupied Germany,
that year a production line began fabricating what soon amounted he guessed, they reached the other electrode—many micrometers France became enchanted with pursuing the nuclear genie unbot- which could not exploit its own radar expertise until the 1950s.
to thousands of rectifiers per month. distant. There they would bolster the conductivity under this elec- tled in the 1940s, while ignorant of its promising transistron. In the absence of any such advantages, it was inevitable that
On the top floor the men kept offices and rooms where they often trode and enhance the current through it. “Welker didn’t really Mataré and Welker struggled on in Paris for two more years, but Europe’s fledgling transistor would soon be eclipsed by other, bet-
stayed overnight—especially during that frantic first year. Mataré understand my measurements,” Mataré says. “At the time he was as support for their operation waned during the early 1950s, they ter semiconductor devices and eventually fade from memory. ■
wistfully remembers awakening now and then to the soft trills of too busy studying superconductivity.” started looking for jobs in their native land. In 1951 Welker accepted
Welker playing his violin in the adjoining room. But as the two men were debating the merits of their compet- a post at Siemens in Erlangen, Germany, where he pioneered early ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With the rectifiers finally in production by late 1947, Welker ing interpretations, surprising news arrived from across the Atlantic. research on III-V compound semiconductors, such as gallium MICHAEL RIORDAN teaches the history of physics at Stanford
resumed his research on superconductivity, while Mataré began to In a 30 June press conference, Bell Labs suddenly lifted its six-month arsenide. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, those materials fostered University, in California, and the University of California, Santa
address the curious interference effects he had seen in germanium veil of secrecy and announced the invention of the transistor by a small optoelectronics revolution in semiconductor lasers and light- Cruz. He is coauthor of Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Informa-
duodiodes during the war. When he put the two point contacts Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley. The breakthrough was reported emitting diodes. Welker became head of all R&D projects at Siemens tion Age.
less than 100 µm apart, he again occasionally could get one of them in The New York Times on 1 July and published in the 15 July issue in 1969 and retired in 1977. He died in 1981.
to influence the other. With a positive voltage on one point, in of Physical Review. Incredibly, the Bell Labs solid-state amplifier also In 1952, with solid funding from a wealthy German business- TO PROBE FURTHER
HERBERT MATARÉ/INTERMETALL

fact, he could modulate and even amplify the electrical signal at had a pair of closely spaced metal points prodding into a germanium man, Jakob Michael, Mataré moved to Düsseldorf, Germany, and For more details on the invention of the transistron, see “The
the other! Mataré reckons he first recognized this effect in early surface. [See photo, “Getting to the Point.”] founded a company called Intermetall. It began manufacturing ger- ‘French’ Transistor,” by Armand Van Dormael, in Proceedings of
1948 (perhaps a month or two after Bardeen and Brattain’s break- Mataré soon learned Bardeen and Brattain’s explanation of the manium rectifiers and transistors similar to the point-contact devices the 2004 IEEE Conference on the History of Electronics,
through at Bell Labs). But it still happened only sporadically. curious effects he had been observing. Electrons trapped on the ger- he had made in Paris. The company bought or built equipment that Bletchley Park, England, June 2004. It is available on the Web
On a hunch, he asked Welker to fashion larger germanium sam- manium surface induce a shallow, positively charged layer just helped it produce semiconductor devices of even higher quality. at http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/
ples, from which they could cut slivers of higher purity. Using this beneath it. Holes emitted by the control electrode (which they had The summit of Intermetall’s achievements came at the 1953 Che2004/VanDormael.pdf.

50 IEEE Spectrum | November 2005 | INT www.spectrum.ieee.org www.spectrum.ieee.org November 2005 | IEEE Spectrum | INT 51