Julius Lilienfeld discovered the transistor quietly in 1927 with early versions coming to market just before the Depression began. It seems like a perfect storm from discovery to small-scale mass production in just 2.5 years but suppose Lilienfeld either doesn't get the capital from Guggenheim or the key paper doesn't get the needed attention. What might have changed?
DBWI: Transistor delayed
- Thread starter M79
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It likely would've been at least a decade before the sandwich transistor was invented, which would have delayed quite a few advances from electromechanical computers to pure electronic.
This means a lot of things, such as fire control systems being notably larger on ships made during the 1930s, the encryption and decryption race would use completely different machines, and you wouldn't have Konrad Zuse's Z series of weather calculation computers. Other things may include the "smart" torpedo and later missile experiments made by Britain and Germany respectively, (in retrospect the Polish won the first race... they did have people like Banach after all).
Also a notably later computer market for consumers, probably delayed until the 1960s or so rather than the early 50s. The transistor did to electronics what Krupp steel did to ship armor; reduced bulk dramatically.
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Deleted member 1487
OOC: the necessary production quality did not exist in the 1920s or 30s for transistors. Lilienfeld's patents were based on ideas, not working prototypes and IIRC likely wouldn't have worked without a lot of further development. All his patents did was point out the idea for further development once other necessary technologies caught up.
Vacuum tubing would've been more eponymous for longer too, though they still were used to a degree in most machines (since while more finicky, they were still much cheaper than the sandwich transistor) until the early 50s or so, since the usage of silicon wasn't really easily done until the industries for them were in place (namely for military computers).
OOC: That's why I went with simpler and larger "sandwich style" transistors for this one that only really begins to miniaturize after a decade or so.
Wish I had not let go my old tube radio out of a 59 Ford Galxie. Like most tube radios it had a rich tone. What some afficiandos described as 'golden'.
Well, for onething, we wouldn't have had the famous "radio razzle dazzle" - Nazi spies tried to sneak around and see what could be found out about the Manhattan Project," and instread some smart guy decided to make them think the secret was improvements in transistors - of course they were working with radios and other items as one of the many projects the Americans had during WW2, but they gave the spies some experimental transistor radios - with no transistors in them! I would have loved to have seen their faces when they got back to Berlin.
(Of course, we kind of did when Hogan's Heroes did that episode that had the Heroes taking part in the caper, but still...)
I don't think the spies would have gotten anywhere near the Manhattan Project, but it was still good to have something else to give them.
But yeah, I wonder if they could have had the Mercury project without computers on board. I mean, there were computers to help with re-entry, and while having computers on the ground give instructions that would then be radioed up would, in theory, be doable, it seems pretty far-fetched. So, that may delay Project Mercury by several years.
(OOC: Not sure how early those "sandwich type" ones from above could have been done, but I'm guessing something about the early transistors speeds this up at least some; and, the Mercury capsule OTL didn't have computers, they really did use computations fromt he ground radioed up to the capsule.)
(Of course, we kind of did when Hogan's Heroes did that episode that had the Heroes taking part in the caper, but still...)
I don't think the spies would have gotten anywhere near the Manhattan Project, but it was still good to have something else to give them.
But yeah, I wonder if they could have had the Mercury project without computers on board. I mean, there were computers to help with re-entry, and while having computers on the ground give instructions that would then be radioed up would, in theory, be doable, it seems pretty far-fetched. So, that may delay Project Mercury by several years.
(OOC: Not sure how early those "sandwich type" ones from above could have been done, but I'm guessing something about the early transistors speeds this up at least some; and, the Mercury capsule OTL didn't have computers, they really did use computations fromt he ground radioed up to the capsule.)
Telemetry computers did exist though; von Braun and to a lesser degree Goddard did have ground computers that'd radio in and adjust rockets. This purpose was negated though by the late thirties, when miniaturization allowed for simple computers to be put into things like torpedoes and later on missiles.
And the experiment the Abwehr was looking for was specifically semiconducting technology, which we were experimenting with, but the material science and construction standards were too poor to easily do this. It's similar to how we knew we could make nitrates from the air, but it took improvements in vacuum technology and chemistry to make mass batches of that viable.