"My first stop on any time-travel ex-pedition", Bill Gates once said, "would be Bell Labs in December 1947." That was the time and place of the invention of the transistor, which powered the technology revolution that built today's connected world. The handful of scientists who gathered in downtown Manhattan to witness the first demonstration of this transformational technology understood that it was special. The transistor was, one observer noted, "a basically new thing in the world" (other Bell Labs discoveries would earn the same astonished praise). The breakthrough was so big that William Shockley, the boss of the two scientists who made it, spent the next weeks in torment until he designed a better version. In doing so he broke a sacred Bell Labs rule-"absolutely never to compete with underlings"—for which he was never forgiven.
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