|
Mr.
Stanley provided these comments
in July and August, 2001.
It was the moment of truth, a sparkling
mid-fifties, midsummer noon. High
noon for us. Dave Holmes and I were
far out in the RCA Laboratories parking lot listening in near reverence to
"do not forsake me, oh my darling" booming with gratifying
richness from a little box the size of today's palm pilot. This was
the first field test of our elegant little transistor radio. A few all-transistor radios had been
assembled earlier, but this was the first to be subject, successfully, to
exhaustive performance checks. It was the model for commercial transistor
radios that followed in due course.
Ironically, people called the little radios "transistors!"
I'd had a hand, too, in one
of those earlier radios, not long after I joined RCA in 1950, reporting as
a trainee to Loy Barton.
Disarmingly “Davy Crockettish” for a researcher, Loy was one of the
small handful of wizards fabricating point-contact transistors, forming
collector junctions by judiciously locating a sewing-needle point on the
germanium wafer surface, and then zapping it electrically (Charlie
Mueller's wonderful alloy-junction transistors had not yet come into
being.)
Go
To Stanley, Page 2
|
