December 23: The transistor was first demonstrated at Bell Labs (1947)

At AT&T's Bell Labs, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain performed experiments and observed that a signal was produced with the output power greater than the input when two gold point contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium. William Shockley, Bell Labs' Solid State Physics Group leader, saw the potential of this amplifier and worked further on it with Bardeen and Brattain. Within a year, the three researchers developed the first point-contact transistor. The term transistor was coined by John Pierce, meaning "transfer resistor". This was one of the monumental cornerstones of the semiconductor era.