The Transistor: How Three Men at Bell Labs Built the Device Inside Everything

In December 1947, three physicists huddled in a New Jersey laboratory and created a fingernail-sized device that would become more ubiquitous than any invention in human history. Today, your smartphone contains more transistors than there are people on Earth—over 15 billion of them—all descendants of that first crude contraption made from germanium and gold foil. This is the story of how the transistor shrank computers from room-sized machines to pocket-sized supercomputers, and why the bitter rivalry between its inventors ended in betrayal, a Nobel Prize, and one man's tragic fall from grace.