Following the Thread: Electronics Industry

The invention of the first analog computer is traced back to the beginning of the first century BC. In ancient Greece, the Antikythera mechanism, a mechanical model of the solar system — discovered in a shipwreck off the coast of Antikythera island in 1901 — was used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses and track the four-year cycles of the Olympic Games. Yet, it took centuries for such mechanical devices to once more emerge in Europe, toward the end of the seventeenth century. In 1861 and 1862, the famous Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of laws (Maxwell’s equations) that proved that electricity, magnetism, and light were all manifestations of the same phenomenon: electromagnetic radiation. This discovery, called the second great unification of physics (after Newton’s work), led a bit less than a century later to the invention of the transistor, in 1947, by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley from Bell Labs in the United States. Geared devices could then be replaced by electric currents and “switches” (transistors), which performed calculations. Solid-state electronics research then expanded at a rapid pace. Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng invented the metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) in 1959, the most widely used type of transistor. The integrated circuit was developed by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1959 and followed by the invention of the microprocessor by Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin, Stanley Mazo, and Masatoshi Shima from Intel in 1971. This score of inventions led to the development of the modern electronics and information technology industry. Electronics pervaded every application, and the rapid development of consumer electronics and personal computers did the rest. To this date, 13 sextillion MOSFETs are thought to have been manufactured, a figure that simply surpasses one’s imagination. In fact, this series of developments was even called the third industrial revolution, which followed the steam (and coal) revolution in the early 1800s and that of electricity at the dawn of the twentieth century…