Insights from Chapter 2
#1
The law of the most famous explains why important discoveries are usually made by one member of a group of investigators. It is a humorous principle that explains why Edison got all the credit for the discovery of the Edison Effect, when in reality, it was already known and patent pending.
#2
The Edison Effect was not a great interest for Thomas Edison. He said that he did not care about scientific interest, only the size of the silver dollar. He was a classic American story, with elements of the classic American life.
#3
Edison was a uncouth hay-seed who flaunted his disdain for cleanliness, fashion, order, religion, and science. He had absolute confidence in his motto Perseverantia omnia vincit, which means Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.
#4
The Edison Effect is the mysterious current that flows through a vacuum. It was discovered by Edison and his assistant, Upton, who put a small metal plate inside the bulb. They found that electric current was flowing in the metal plate.
#5
The television picture tube is a descendant of the cathode ray tube, which was used to study the flow of electricity through a vacuum. The basic apparatus for this work was an elongated glass tube with a piece of carbon or metal at one end that was heated until the thermal energy emitted an electric current through the vacuum.
#6
The mystery of electricity had prompted a number of contradictory hypotheses. The most famous was that electricity was a wave phenomenon, like sound and light. But another theory considered the electric beam in the cathode ray tube to be a stream of particles.
#7
Thomson, the professor, was the father of modern physics. He was the preeminent Cambridge physicist, and he took over Maxwell’s old office in the Cavendish Laboratory. He was determined to find out everything he could about that electric beam shooting through the cathode ray tube.
#8
Thomson’s research proved that the cathode ray was not made up of particles, but rather consisted of subatomic particles called electrons. These particles were found in every atom, and explained the mysterious force of electricity.
#9
The electron was the second subatomic particle to be discovered, and it was found that it carried a negative charge. The world of physics accepted the existence of the electron and the proton because the theory worked. It explained many things about atomic structure and electricity that had not been understood before.
#10
Thomson’s leap of insight was based on experiments he had done on electric current in a vacuum. His explanation of electric current, a flow of moving charges, is still valid today for current in a block of semiconductor material.
#11
In the early 1900s, radio was still a toy, and there were several problems facing the Marconi company. The first was the inability to tune the radios to a specific frequency. The second was the lack of a reliable rectifier, which converts radio signals into direct current.
#12
The Fleming diode made it possible to produce dependable radio receivers. But there was still another problem to be solved before radio became a practical instrument for sending information over any appreciable distance: radio beams attenuate as they travel.
#13
The radio amplifier, which was based on a fundamental principle of electricity, was the most important invention of De Forest. It was a precise amplifying mechanism. If the weak current from a distant radio signal was sent to the wire screen, it shaped a much stronger current that precisely matched the fluctuations of the radio beam.
#14
The renaissance of the semiconductor began in the late 1930s, spurred by the growing fear of war between Britain and Germany. The British developed a radar system that could find planes and gauge their distance, which allowed the British to defend themselves against the Germans.
#15
The architect of the atom was Niels Bohr, a Dane who worked out the basic architecture of the atom. He was not, as Einstein was, impersonally kind to the human race. He was simply and genuinely kind.
#16
Bohr’s theory of the atom is the most common model seen in high school science books today. It states that electrons orbit around a central nucleus, and that the number of electrons in each orbit determines the material’s conductivity.
#17
The quantum view of conductivity can be tested because of the experiments that determined the conductivity of specific materials. The materials that are the best conductors are those with a single electron in the outermost orbit. Semiconductors have four electrons in the outermost ring.
#18
The flow of holes is not firmly established in Thomson’s day, but it is in the 1930s, when all men of science have a firm grounding in the classics. The hole is then given a Greek or Latin name, like vacutron or nihilon.
#19
The will to think is the most important factor for a successful thinker. It is the discipline of competent thinking that helps you solve any problem.
#20
The theory that blacks are dumber than whites was proposed by Shockley, a physicist with no training in genetics. He was burned in effigy on both coasts and was denied the right to speak at some of the nation’s most prestigious colleges.
#21
The controversy around Shockley was that he seemed like a pleasant grandfatherly type, when in reality he was very intense and determined. He had a reputation for getting the most out of the people who worked with him.
#22
The third member of the transistor team was John Bardeen. He was a perfect complement to Brattain, as he was not the type of person who could wiggle a piece of machinery just right and make it work. He was the theoretical physicist who explained the results of Brattain’s experiments.
#23
The world’s first solid-state amplifier was a jury-rigged affair put together by Bardeen and Brattain in 1946. It involved two fine wires placed extremely close to each other at the P-N junction on a small piece of germanium. If the wires were set at exactly the right spot, and if Brattain wiggled them just right, a small current flowing into one wire could be amplified to a current one hundred times as great.
#24
The first transistor, invented by Bell Labs employees, was a point-contact device that amplified current. It was a cumbersome, imprecise instrument that would not have made a significant impact on its own. But it inspired Shockley to improve on it, which led to the junction transistor.
#25
The transistor, a much more efficient and powerful amplifier than the vacuum tube, was a stupendous success. It could switch ultra-high-speed, and this made possible the modern computer and all its myriad offspring and networks.