Walter Houser Brattain

Walter Houser Brattain (February 10, 1902?October 13, 1987) was an American physicist at Bell Labs who, along with John Bardeen and William Shockley, invented the transistor. They shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention. He devoted much of his life to research on surface states.

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He was born to Ross R. Brattain and Ottilie Houser in Amoy, China on February 10, 1902 and spent the early part of his life in Springfield, Oregon and Washington in the United States. He was raised in Washington on a cattle ranch owned by his parents, and earned his B.S. degree in physics and mathematics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Brattain earned that degree in 1924 and an M.A. degree from the University of Oregon in 1926. He then moved eastward, taking his Ph.D. degree in physics at the University of Minnesota in 1929. Brattain's advisor was John T. Tate, and his thesis was on electron impact in mercury vapor. In 1928 and 1929 he worked at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., and in 1929 was hired by Bell Telephone Laboratories.

American: :This page disambiguates the many uses of American. For an article about those various uses, please see Use of the word American....

Bell Labs: Bell Telephone Laboratories (or sometimes AT&T Bell Laboratories), best known as Bell Labs, was originally the research and development arm of the United States Bell System. It was the premier corporate facility of its type, developing a range of revolutionary technologies from telephone switches t...

John Bardeen: John Bardeen (May 23 1908 – January 30 1991) was an American physicist. He is the only person to have won two Nobel prizes in Physics, in 1956 for the transistor, along with William Bradford Shockley and Walter Brattain, and in 1972 for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity t...

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