The boundaries of industrial research: Making transistors at RCA, 1948-1960

Technology and Culture

Volumn 48, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 758-782

  Choi, Hyungsub ^a  

^a Chemical Heritage Foundation   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 36248953844     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.2007.0157     Document Type: Review

References (111)

1. Quoted in C. E. Kenneth Mees, Organization of Industrial Scientific Research (New York, 1920), v.
2. Charles William Mueller, "The Secondary Emission of Glass as a Function of Temperature and Voltage" (Sc.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1942);
3. Wayne B. Nottingham, Thermionic Emission (Cambridge, Mass., 1956).
4. This is akin to the growing body of literature that takes technological innovation beyond the laboratory; see, for example, Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini, Laboratories, Workshops, and Sites: Concepts and Practices of Applied Research in Industrial Europe, 1800-1914 (Berkeley, Calif., 1999).
5. "Basic research" was the term used in Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President (Washington, D.C., 1945);
6. David Hounshell, "The Evolution of Industrial Research in the US," in Engines of Innovation: US Industrial Research at the End of an Era, ed. Richard S. Rosenbloom and William J. Spencer (Boston, 1996), 13-85.
7. See also John Kenly Smith Jr., "The Scientific Tradition in American Industrial Research," Technology and Culture 31 (1990): 121-31.
8. Scott G. Knowles and Stuart W. Leslie, "'Industrial Versailles': Eero Saarinen's Corporate Campuses for GM, IBM, and AT&T," Isis 92 (2001): 1-33.
9. Glen Asner shows how postwar U.S. tax law facilitated this trend in "The Linear Model, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Golden Age of Industrial Research," in The Science-Industry Nexus: History, Policy, Implications, ed. Karl Grandin, Nina Wormbs, and Sven Widmalm (Sagamore Beach, Mass., 2004).
10. For a discussion of the earlier debate on basic and applied research, see Ronald Kline, "Construing 'Technology' as 'Applied Science': Public Rhetoric of Scientists and Engineers in the United States, 1880-1945," Isis 86 (1995): 194-221;
11. Michael Aaron Dennis, "Accounting for Research: New Histories of Corporate Laboratories and the Social History of American Science," Social Studies of Science 17 (1987): 479-518.
12. Margaret B. W. Graham, "Industrial Research in the Age of Big Science," Research on Technological Innovation Management and Policy 2 (1985): 47-79 (quote on 63);
13. and Margaret B. W. Graham, The Business of Research: RCA and the VideoDisc (New York, 1986), chap. 3.
14. Stuart W. Leslie, "Blue Collar Science: Bringing the Transistor to Life in the Lehigh Valley," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 32 (2001): 71-113;
15. Ross Knox Bassett, To the Digital Age: Research Labs, Start-up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology (Baltimore, 2002), 288;
16. Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech (Cambridge, Mass., 2005);
17. Leslie Berlin, The Man behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (New York, 2005);
18. Christophe Lécuyer and David C. Brock, "The Materiality of Microelectronics," History and Technology 22 (2006): 301-25.
19. Intel co-founders Robert N. Noyce and Gordon E. Moore were acutely aware of the "problems of technology transfer" at Fairchild (Berlin, 171-72). See also Bassett, chap. 6 and app. 1, fig. A.4 (for Intel's organizational chart in the spring of 1969).
20. "The News of Radio," New York Times, 1 July 1948.
21. "Solid-State (Crystal) Amplifiers," E. W. Herold Notebooks, P-2758, in the David Sarnoff Library, Princeton, N.J. (hereafter DSL).
22. "The News of Radio."
23. RCA Laboratories, Research Report 1947, 2. The Research Report was an annual publication reporting the RCA Laboratories division's activities to RCA management. It was for internal use and was not circulated outside the company.
24. RCA Laboratories, RCA Laboratories: A New Center of Radio Research Pioneering (Princeton, N.J., 1942), 3.
25. Kenyon Kilbon, "Pioneering in Electronics: A Short History of the Origins and Growth of RCA Laboratories, Radio Corporation of America, 1919 to 1964," unpublished typescript, revised August 1964, 189; paginated copy available online at http://www.davidsarnoff.org/kil.html (accessed 13 June 2007).
26. Ibid.
27. RCA Laboratories, Research Report 1948, 18-19.
28. A number of different terms were used to describe the project, including "three-element crystal amplifiers," "semiconductor amplifier," "crystal triode," and, of course, "Transistor" (with a capital T, in an expectation that Bell Labs would trademark the name). That RCA singled out "Tubeless Amplifier" as the name of the group shows that the goal of the project was to replace tube amplifiers with solid-state devices.
29. Just before being put in charge of the Tubeless Amplifier group, Kurshan was involved in projects such as "Low-Cost Mixer Tube with Automatic Frequency Control," "Tubes to Operate over Wide Heater-Voltage Range," and "V-H-F Oscillator Tube with Automatic Frequency Control"; see "Progress Report - June 1948," J. Kurshan Notebooks, P-971, DSL.
30. "Progress Report - July 1948," Kurshan Notebooks, P-972, DSL.
31. Ibid.
32. See various progress reports between July and November 1948 in Kurshan Notebooks, P-972, DSL; "Clear-cut trends" quoted from "Progress Report - October 1948," Kurshan Notebooks, P-972, DSL.
33. This was part of what William Shockley called "mysterious witchcraft" involved in point-contact transistors; see Shockley, "How We Made the Transistor," New Scientist 21 (1972): 689-91.
34. "Progress Report - August 1948," Kurshan Notebooks, P-972, DSL.
35. 2; 7. Use press to force crystal against points - 1 mil advance after contact; 8. Cover active area with opal wax mixture" (Kurshan, "Molded 2-contact transistor," 17 December 1948, Kurshan Notebooks, P-973, DSL).
36. "Progress Report - November 1948," Kurshan Notebooks, P-972, DSL.
37. J. Kurshan, "Trip Report - Visit to Physics Department, Purdue University, December 14-15, 1948," Herold Notebooks, P-2761, DSL.
38. For the state of Purdue's solid-state research, see Paul W. Henriksen, "Solid-State Physics Research at Purdue," Osiris, 2nd series, vol. 3 (1987): 237-60;
39. Vivian Annabelle Johnson, Karl Lark-Horovitz: Pioneer in Solid-State Physics (Oxford, 1969).
40. J. Kurshan, "Digest of Purdue Patent Applications on Semi-Conductors," Kurshan Notebooks, P-972, DSL.
41. Electrical engineer Robert N. Hall, oral history conducted with the author, 2004; transcript available at the IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.
42. S. M. Christian, "Use of Germanium Single Crystal," Christian Notebooks, P-2030, DSL;
43. "Progress Report - November 1950," Jacques I. Pantchechnikoff (Pankove) Notebooks, P-2424, DSL.
44. W. Shockley, "The Theory of P-N Junctions in Semiconductors and P-N Junction Transistors," Bell System Technical Journal 28 (1949): 435-89.
45. For the background of this article, see Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age (New York, 1997), 177-78. Germanium crystal containing an excess of electrons is called "N-type" germanium; that with a lack of electrons (and hence, excess of "holes") is called "P-type."
46. Riordan and Hoddeson, 182-83.
47. Electrical engineer Charles W. Mueller, oral history conducted with Mark Heyer and Al Pinsky, 1975; transcript available at the IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.
48. "Progress Report - April 1950," Pankove Notebooks, P-2424, DSL. Cold welding was a method of adjoining materials by pressing the two parts together without the use of heat.
49. "Progress Report - June 1950," ibid.
50. B. N. Slade, "A High-Performance Transistor with Wide Spacing between Contacts," RCA Review 11 (1950): 517-26;
51. "A Method of Improving the Electrical and Mechanical Stability of Point-Contact Transistors," RCA Review 12 (1951): 651-59;
52. "The Control of Frequency Response and Stability of Point-Contact Transistors," Proceedings of the IRE 40 (1952): 1382-84.
53. R. N. Hall and W. C. Dunlap, "P-N Junctions Prepared by Impurity Diffusion," Physical Review 80 (1950): 467-68.
54. For short descriptions of GE's transistor program, see Ernest Braun and Stuart MacDonald, Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics (Cambridge, 1978), 55; Riordan and Hoddeson (n. 30 above), 199-200.
55. For more detail, see George Wise, "Research and Results: A History of R&D at General Electric, 1946-1978" (unpublished manuscript, 1980), copy available at Special Collections Department, Union College, Schenectady, N.Y.;
56. Addison C. Sheckler, "The Beginning of the Semiconductor World: General Electric's Role," paper presented at the IEEE Conference on the History of Electronics, Bletchley Park, UK, 29 June 2004.
57. It would be surprising if anyone interested in transistors did not search Physical Review for articles related to the topic, since this was the major venue in which to publish research results in solid-state physics.
58. "Other laboratories (Bell Labs and GE Research Laboratory) have described junction rectifiers and transistors ... and have published characteristics of these devices. However, they have not released detailed information on how to produce the necessary close-spaced P-N junctions. In the meantime we have developed independently at RCA Laboratories methods of producing P-N junctions in single crystals of germanium" (RCA Laboratories, Research Report 1951, 136).
59. "Progress Report - January 1951," Pankove Notebooks, P-2425, DSL.
60. "Progress Report - February 1951," ibid.
61. "Progress Report - September 1951," ibid.
62. RCA Laboratories, Research Report 1951, 136.
63. Electrical engineer Charles W. Mueller, interview with Jack Ward, November 1998; available online at http://www.ck722museum.com/history/rca/ OralHistory/Mueller/Mueller_Index.htm (accessed 25 July 2007).
64. Mueller oral history (n. 32 above).
65. For an example, see "Detailed Instruction for Transistor Assembly for 10 Units on Order to 2-6-52," Charles W. Mueller Notebooks, P-4194, DSL.
66. Mueller oral history.
67. "Tentative Presentations for Licensee Transistor Meetings, October 30, 1952," Herold Notebooks, P-2509, DSL, 2.
68. "First Proposal: Tentative Program for Licensee Symposium on Transistors," ibid.
69. After the symposium, participants received the 792-page anthology of technical papers on the topics covered at the symposium. Titled simply The Transistor (1951), it was widely circulated with the nickname, "Ma Bell's Cookbook" - arguably a misrepresentation, given its lack of information on manufacturing. See Morgan E. McMahon, "Attending the 1951 Symposium: The Great Transistor Symposium of 1951, an Attendee's Viewpoint," Vintage Electronics 2 (1990): 29-30.
70. "Tentative Presentations for Licensee Transistor Meetings, October 30, 1952," 1.
71. Consider, for example, Mueller's explanation of the junction transistor during the RCA symposium. He drew an analogy between the vacuum tube and the transistor: "[T]his emitter is like a cathode of a vacuum tube, to inject carriers into a region where there weren't any before. [Also,] the collector here is like a large basket to collect more easily all the holes that are put in by the emitter" (ibid., 36-37, 40).
72. Ibid., 36-44.
73. R. R. Law, C. W. Mueller, J. I. Pankove, and L. D. Armstrong, "A Developmental Germanium P-N-P Junction Transistor," Proceedings of the IRE 40 (1952): 1352-57. The licensee bulletin was LB-868, "Germanium P-N-P Junction Transistors," Herold Notebooks, P-2917, DSL.
74. "RCA Victor's Commercial Transistor Output Started," Wall Street Journal, 14 May 1953.
75. James D. Fahnestock, "Production Techniques in Transistor Manufacture," Electronics 26 (1953): 131.
76. Mueller interview (n. 43 above).
77. C. W. Mueller and L. Pensak, "Intermediate-Frequency Transistor - Construction and Pilot Production" (1956), PTR-549, box B-19, accession no. 2069, Hagley Museum and Library (hereafter RCA-Hagley), Wilmington, Del.
78. Alexander B. Magoun, David Sarnoff Research Center: From RCA Labs to Sarnoff Corporation (Charleston, S.C., 2003), 61.
79. "The Steering Committee for Research in the Electronics of Solids," 10 May 1951, Herold Notebooks, P-3378, DSL.
80. "Report of SCRES Activity (May 1951-February 1952)," ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. RCA Laboratories, Research Report 1951, 1.
83. Jerome Kurshan, "Monthly Progress Report of Semiconductor Physics Group (Sep. 9, 1952),"
84. and R. R. Law, "Progress Report - August 1952, Semiconductor Devices Group," both documents in Pankove Notebooks, P-2274, DSL.
85. Jerome Kurshan, "Monthly Progress Report of Semiconductor Physics Group - December 1952,"
86. and Harwick Johnson, "Monthly Progress Report - Semiconductor Devices Group - December 1952," both documents in ibid.
87. "SCRES to Long-Range Research Planning Committee (March 12, 1952)," Herold Notebooks, P-3378, DSL.
88. "Discussion with D. H. Ewing, November 20, 1956," DSRC PR Collection, Laboratory History, box 5, file 17 ("Conversations and Interviews by Kenyon Kilbon" [Papers 1956]), DSL.
89. RCA Laboratories, Research Report 1954, 1.
90. RCA Laboratories, Research Report 1955, 1 (emphasis added).
91. Theodore Philip Kovaleff, Business and Government during the Eisenhower Government (Athens, Ohio, 1980), 49-60.
92. "U.S. v. Radio Corporation of America (28 October 1958)," in American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Antitrust Consent Decrees, 1906-1966: Compendium of Abstracts (Washington, D.C., 1968), 1201-5.
93. E. W. Engstrom, The History of RCA and of Research in RCA (Princeton, N.J., 1954), 19.
94. Kilbon (n. 14 above), 196.
95. L. R. Weisbert, F. D. Rosi, and P. G. Herkart, "Material Research on GaAs and InP for High Temperature Transistors" (1959), PTR-868, box B-26, RCA-Hagley.
96. William M. Webster, interview with Ross K. Bassett, 27 May 1994. I thank the interviewer for providing me with a copy of the transcript.
97. Industrial Preparedness Study: Transistors and Transistor Manufacturing Equipment, Quarterly Report No. 4, 25 July 1953, 1 (Signal Corps Supply Agency Contract No. DA 36-039-SC-30241, Order No. 33546-Phila-52-ISD; copy available at DSL).
98. Industrial Preparedness Study: Transistors and Transistor Manufacturing Equipment, Quarterly Report No. 10, 25 January 1955, 2 (copy available at DSL).
99. R. E. Higgs and A. L. Gorman, "The Somerville Semiconductor Plant," RCA Engineer 12 (1957): 9.
100. "A Process for the Mechanized Assembly of the 2N217 Alloy Junction Transistor" (15 September 1959), EM-8531, B-100, RCA-Hagley.
101. "Army Micro-Module Program," U.S. Army Signal Research and Development Laboratory Information Bulletin NR. 26 (19 November 1958), U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Life-Cycle Management Command Archives (CE-LCMC) Historical Office, Fort Monmouth, N.J.
102. Joe McLean, "Automated Mass Output Sought for Micromodules," Electronic News 2 (1960): 14.
103. "Presentation, 28 August 1962 by Major General Earle F. Cook, Chief Signal Officer at Micro-module Press Conference, New York, New York," CE-LCMC Historical Office. The army abandoned its micro-module program by 1964, admitting that "by the time production capability [of micro-modules] was established early in 1963, the potential of integrated circuits had advanced rapidly due to commitment of multimillion dollar R&D and manufacturing methods programs by the Air Forces, followed by the commitment of a significant portion of the Minuteman II electronics to this technique."
104. See "Army Micro-Module Program Final Summary Report" (September 1964), CE-LCMC Historical Office;
105. see also Daniel Holbrook, "Government Support of the Semiconductor Industry: Diverse Approaches and Information Flows," Business and Economic History 24 (1995): 133-65;
106. William R. Stevenson, Miniaturization and Microminiaturization of Army Communications - Electronics, 1946-1964 (Fort Monmouth, N.J., 1966).
107. C. W. Mueller, "Ion Implantation - Physics Laboratory to Factory Floor," RCA Engineer 24 (1978-79): 4-9. Ion implantation is a method by which highly precise amounts of impurity atoms can be "bombarded" into a silicon wafer to control its semiconductor characteristics.
108. See, for example, Gordon E. Moore, "Some Personal Perspectives on Research in the Semiconductor Industry," in Engines of Innovation (n. 4 above), 165-74.
109. More recently in the United States, the problem seems to have taken a step further with the forces of globalization and the subsequent outsourcing of manufacturing to foreign countries. For a recent concern on this matter, see Louis Uchitelle, "Goodbye, Production (and Maybe Innovation)," New York Times, 24 December 2006.
110. For the unfolding of RCA's difficulties during the 1960s and 1970s, see Graham, The Business of Research (n. 6 above);
111. and Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries (New York, 2001), 13-49.