Automated semiconductor production was pivotal as the technology infiltrated more than military and computer applications. Space represented a new frontier to be conquered, and there was great political and ideological capital at stake for the victor. In 1957, the Soviet Union startled the world when it launched Sputnik, the first orbital satellite. The United States was caught short with its space program barely off the ground. But the U.S. made a comeback, launching its own first orbital satellite, Explorer I, in 1958. The space race was on, fueled by an explosion in engineering ingenuity from the electronics world. More ambitious probing of the moon and solar system quickly followed the early orbital satellites. The combined efforts of many companies to make the necessary equipment lighter, more precise, and more efficient made these probes possible.
Meanwhile, the newborn that was solid-state electronics was making its presence felt on terra firma in a big way. The transistor radio, introduced in 1954, became the fastest selling consumer product of the time. By 1955, car-crazed Americans, fueled by post-war prosperity and cheap gas, were more than ready for a little driving music. RCA's Sarnoff Research Center answered the call with an experimental nine-transistor car radio. Transistor radios came onto the market in droves, giving America its first taste of its own future: electronics everywhere, packaged to travel and ready for deployment at will whether on the street, in the car, or at home.
One of the earliest commercial applications of junction transistors was in hearing aids. As early as January, 1953, NPN transistors saw use in a hearing-aid circuit that ran for six months on a tiny B battery. Tellingly, it foretold of the advances to come in transistorized circuits by being 25% to 30% smaller than earlier models with twice the output power.
Through the 1940s, radio was king and the theater of the mind still ruled in post-war America. But television's golden age was just beginning in the early fifties and again, electronics led the way. RCA's experimental solid-state (except for the picture tube) TV receiver of 1952 used 37 semiconductor devices, had a five-inch screen, and weighed about 27 pounds. An inauspicious start, perhaps. But as with everything else the electronics industry touched in ensuing decades, the challenge of miniaturizing and improving television sets was ultimately met.
Throughout the industry's history, many technologies found their genesis in the military before trickling down into consumer products. Modularization and miniaturization were an example of this trend. In the beginning, miniaturization was driven by the Soviets' success with the Sputnik program and was a major objective of government-funded electronics research programs. But through work like RCA's solid-state TV, the drive to minimize quickly made its mark on consumer products.
As always, the basic building block of the transistor formed the underpinnings for all of the advances in consumer goods. For most of the 1950s, germanium was used to make transistors. But after Texas Instruments introduced the first silicon transistors in 1954, silicon began to replace germanium as a semiconductor material, thereby extending operating temperatures to military ranges.
As the decade wound down, the pieces were in place for the crucial next step along the path of integration. Engineers at both Fairchild Semiconductor and Texas Instruments sought to produce a single substrate of silicon carrying not only transistors and diodes, but also resistors and capacitors—and then join all the components to form a complete circuit.
In 1958, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor independently developed just such a device—the integrated circuit (IC). The first monolithic IC was built in 1958 at Texas Instruments when Kilby constructed a phase-shift oscillator from a single silicon bar. The device required no interconnections between one component and another: The electrical path was through the silicon. TI was also the first company to announce a product line of ICs.
By the end of the decade, the transistor had rightfully earned its place in the forefront of technology and, in fact, had begun to fulfill its promise to take the industry much further. Government got into the act in 1958, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to keep the U.S. at the forefront of technology. ARPA would, in the next decade, plant the seeds for one of the greatest technology advances of the century—the Internet.
A decade of contradictions, social and political, managed by its close to coalesce into one of great technological advances. The 1950s set the stage for the computer advances that would be seen in the sixties and on into the seventies. And it was the beginning of rapid change in electronics, changes that would heavily impact the way Americans lived their everyday lives.
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