Generative Art Timeline · Chapter 2: Modern Era (1850–1949)

1947

Bell Labs Team Discovers the Transistor

Invention · North America

The three Bell Labs physicists credited with the transistor, in one of the publicity photographs AT&T issued around the 1948 public announcement.
The three Bell Labs physicists credited with the transistor, in one of the publicity photographs AT&T issued around the 1948 public announcement. John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain at Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1948. AT&T publicity photograph; public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Replacing the vacuum tube-concept of ENIAC, the discovery of the transistor by the team of Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain at Bell Labs sparked a revolution in electronics. In just a few short years electronic devices including radios and computers could be produced much more reliably due to transistors.

Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random, fact-checked September 2026.

Sources

People

John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, William Shockley

Movements

Technology and Art, computer art, Computing Machinery

Filed under

Technologies
ENIAC, transistor, vacuum tube
People
John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, William Shockley
Organisations
Bell Labs

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