Walter Houser Brattain was an American physicist at Bell Labs who, along with fellow scientists John Bardeen and William Shockley, invented the point-contact transistor in December 1947. They shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention. Brattain devoted much of his life to research on surface states.
Brattain c. 1950
A stylized replica of the first transistor
John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs, 1948
Bell Labs is an American industrial research and scientific development company. Researchers from there are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others. Ten Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
An aerial photo of Bell Labs' headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey in 2012
Bell's 1893 Volta Bureau building in Washington, D.C.
The Bell Laboratories Building, built at 463 West Street in New York City in 1925
The Old Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, located about 20 miles south of New York City, in New Jersey
