28:33
One of the men who invented the transistor stood at a Bell Labs...
xanax@donttouchxanax
6 views
Jul 25, 2026
~1 min read
One of the men who invented the transistor stood at a Bell Labs blackboard and explained how it works. AT&T kept the film. Almost nobody watches it.
Walter Brattain shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for the transistor. Every chip training every model in 2026 descends from what he built with Bardeen and Shockley in 1947.
This is 28 minutes of the inventor teaching semiconductor physics himself. Properties, simple model, history, impact, new phenomena, written on the board in his own hand.
Watch the section where he draws the crystal lattice and shows what an electron and a hole actually do inside it. The abstraction most engineers carry around, drawn from scratch by the man who found it.
An embedded engineer I know watched it twice and said 28 minutes of chalk beat a semester of textbook diagrams.
Free on YouTube from the AT&T archives, 10 chapters, black and white.
Everyone uses his invention. Almost nobody hears him explain it.
Walter Brattain shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for the transistor. Every chip training every model in 2026 descends from what he built with Bardeen and Shockley in 1947.
This is 28 minutes of the inventor teaching semiconductor physics himself. Properties, simple model, history, impact, new phenomena, written on the board in his own hand.
Watch the section where he draws the crystal lattice and shows what an electron and a hole actually do inside it. The abstraction most engineers carry around, drawn from scratch by the man who found it.
An embedded engineer I know watched it twice and said 28 minutes of chalk beat a semester of textbook diagrams.
Free on YouTube from the AT&T archives, 10 chapters, black and white.
Everyone uses his invention. Almost nobody hears him explain it.
