![]() Originally, Eccles and Jordan most likely used Audion tubes or British-made knock-offs. This circuit is built around two vacuum tubes, so I started there. ![]() Modern flip-flops are built in countless numbers out of transistors in integrated circuits, but, as the centenary of the flip-flop approached, I decided to replicate Eccles and Jordan’s original circuit as closely as possible. Its existence was popularized by an article in the December 1919 issue of The Radio Review, and two decades later, the flip-flop would find its way into the Colossus computer, used in England to break German wartime ciphers, and into the ENIAC in the United States. The flip-flop was created in the predigital age as a trigger relay for radio designs. This allows circuits to remember and synchronize their states, and thus allows them to perform sequential logic. The flip-flop is a crucial building block of digital circuits: It acts as an electronic toggle switch that can be set to stay on or off even after an initial electrical control signal has ceased. Jordan, who applied for a patent for the flip-flop 100 years ago, in June 1918. ![]() Yet few know the names of William Eccles and F.W. Seems more like you have some “scientist’s legacy ruined by him being a bit of a jerk” angle.Many engineers are familiar with the names of Lee de Forest, who invented the amplifying vacuum tube, or John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, who invented the transistor. I have no idea what qualifies as great scientist here. I’m not impressed much by a guy who can crank out papers and be important in post-WW2 U.S. He even made efforts to have the patent written only in his name, and told Bardeen and Brattain of his intentions. This angered Shockley, who thought his name should also be on the patents because the work was based on his field effect idea. Shockley's name was not on any of these patent applications. He ran on a single-issue platform of highlighting the "dysgenic threat" ![]() Shockley was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 1982 United States Senate election in California. “ My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and, thus, not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in the environment.” Such qualities are unrelated and any theory or discovery must be judged only on its own merits, not on whether the inventor is a nice human or not. Someone could be a mass murderer, but nonetheless he/she could also publish some theory worth of a Nobel prize. The contributions of Bardeen and Brattain are not negligible, but they remain quite small compared to the huge contribution of Shockley. The initial theories of transistors published by Shockley were extremely approximate, but they were usable in practice and their study enabled the appearance of an entire generation of electronics engineers specialized in semiconductor devices. The point-contact transistor was not a really useful device, but its great historical importance is that it triggered a lot of research in semiconductor devices and that the efforts made by Shockley to understand how the point-transistor can function lead him to the invention of the BJT and then of the JFET. The Lilienfeld patents had very little influence at that time because the technology to make such transistors did not exist yet, but nevertheless his patents were a source of inspiration for the Bell team, who actually attempted to make FET transistors similar to those proposed by Lilienfeld, when they discovered by accident the point-contact transistor. No matter what defects had Shockley as a human being, his legacy is much more important than that of Bardeen and Brattain.Įven the fact that he was an awful manager had very positive results for everybody else, because he initially gathered together the best of the best in his company, who, after fleeing from him, founded then the most important semiconductor manufacturing companies in SV.Īlso, the first inventor of transistors was Lilienfeld, who invented a kind of metal-semiconductor FET in 1925 and a kind of depletion-mode metal-insulator-semiconductor FET in 1928. Shockley has published theories of how his transistors function, which enabled the design of such devices. Shockley has really invented the bipolar junction transistor and the junction field-effect transistor, which are far more important electronic devices and which are still used today, unlike the point-contact transistor. Bardeen and Brattain have discovered experimentally the point-contact transistor, without really understanding how it functions.
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