EARLY TRANSISTOR HISTORY AT RCA Israel H. Kalish
Oral History – Iz Kalish I chose the transistor group. I started at Harrison NJ in the transistor development group headed by Jack Gifford.  The advanced development group was headed by Bob Slade.  The applications group was headed by Bob Cohen. I was the first trainee assigned to the transistor group.  The fabrication was done in the Development Shop headed by Art Chettle.  When I got off the training program I was assigned to the group full time with my first assignment being to work on the junction transistor part of a signal corps contract (which was primarily about setting up manufacturing facilities for some point contact devices.  RCA had bought a license from Bell to get patents and technical support the following years.  When I rejoined the group in the fall Joel Ollendorf had joined.  The main market was for hearing aid transistors and Raytheon's CK722 was the competition.  The basic developmental type for RCA was the TA-187 junction transistor.  It was a germanium audio transistor.  The major problem with it was reliability in a humid environment.  The whole industry faced this problem -Raytheon had a major problem after a humid summer because of their plastic package.  My first assignment was to evaluate the stability of hermetically sealed transistors which we accomplished by sealing them in metal vacuum tube envelopes.	Oral History – Iz Kalish Everyone worked on the TA-187.  We had to go through the alphabet twice to identify all the revisions we had for the same basic pellet.  The final hearing aid transistor used a smaller pellet as well as a smaller package.  Our issue that year was reliability and the TA-187 was the vehicle for all our evaluations.  The transistor operation was part of the tube division whose members regarded us with amusement, condescension, and contempt. The semiconductor operation was reorganized and I was loaned to the advanced development group to work on power transistors.  The major issues were thermal resistance and leakage current.  I returned to the transistor development group working for Dr.Adolph Blicher (whose story is an epic in itself) along with Joel and we developed the 2N301.  I was junior to Joel Ollendorf on this project.  Others took over the design after we moved on.  The early power work involved Joel, Dr.Blicher, and myself.  The applications work was done by Bob Minton in Cohen's group.  I still recall the wonder in his voice when he told us our two watt transistor was running at twelve watts.  We then discovered thermal runaway which was not controlled until Carl Turner entered the scene (the Turner twins story is a novel in itself). Go To Kalish Oral History, Page 3
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