The facility and other local AT&T plants would later manufacture semiconductor chips for computers and cell phones, and lasers used in fiber-optic networks. It made a variety of products, including several types and sizes of vacuum tubes, before opening the transistor line. The company broke ground in 1946, and the plant was completed in 1947. Western Electric liked Allentown because at the time, it was a rural area where the company could purchase a large tract of land and where an ample work force would be able to tackle transistor assembly. The only nearby structure was a roadside restaurant called the Blue Pig, which was taken down in 1946, according to company records. Stoll, visited Allentown in October 1945, and found a 40-acre parcel of farm land that he liked. The dentist, George Diefenderfer, passed the information to fellow members of the Allentown Chamber of Commerce.Īt the Chamber’s invitation, Western Electric’s president, Clarence G. Warren Deifer, a Western Electric employee who commuted between his native Allentown and the plant in New York, told his dentist that the company wanted to expand. In the late 1940s, Western Electric needed more space. The quick thinking of a local dentist is largely responsible for Allentown becoming the home of the first transistor production line, rather than New York, where Western Electric operated a plant on Hudson Street. Western Electric was the equipment-manufacturing arm of AT&T, which at that time was the operator of the telephone system, and the corporate parent of Bell Labs. The transistor was invented in 1947 in Murray Hill, N.J., by three Bell Laboratories scientists - John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley - who would later receive the Nobel Prize for their work. “The transistor was an entirely different game.” The transistor differed from the vacuum tube in the same way “caviar is different from fish eggs,” said former Bell Labs researcher Ralph Jaccodine and professor emeritus at Lehigh University. Transistors also lasted longer and had a lower failure rate. The innovation was simpler and cheaper to produce, and used a fraction of the power that vacuum tubes needed. The device miniaturized the functions of vacuum tubes, which the transistor would steadily replace. They can also open and close an electrical circuit.
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