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How Is Technology Used In The Early Twentieth Century

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From a calculator that weighed twenty-seven tons to a slim, multi-purposed object that could fit right into people’s pockets, the development of technology has revolutionized lives all around the world in just over fifty years. The Silicon Valley in California has become the center of technological innovation and home to hundreds of tech corporations that would make technology practical and affordable. Today, technology is found everywhere in people’s everyday lives, with more functions and computing power than what would have ever been imagined in the early twentieth century. Vast amounts of information lie at the click of a mouse as a result of the evolution of electronics in the mid-1900s. Through the new ideas of scientists, such as Robert …show more content…

During World War II, battles were won based on radar, a newly developed technology that would allow soldiers to “see for hundreds of miles.” Both sides used radar, but there were issues regarding vacuum tube rectifiers, the standard equipment of the day. Knowing the potential of radar in warfare, millions of dollars were poured into researching a solution that would lead to victory (“Transistorized”). Vacuum tubes provided important functions that were first used to make radios. They could find weak radio signals and “amplify” it, producing a sound and transferring wireless information across large distances. Besides being a fire hazard, vacuum tubes were large, expensive, and inefficient in their use of power. The first computers were extremely large, often occupying spaces that were the size of whole rooms, and contained thousands of vacuum tubes that were fragile and often burned out, similar to a light bulb (“The History of the Integrated Circuit”). These computers would often stop working in the middle of their calculations, making computing terribly inefficient and impractical to use. This stagnated the development of military and commercial electronic systems, contributing to the failure of vacuum tubes in radar since they could not handle the high-frequency signals required to send out and receive radar beams (Reid 43; …show more content…

Semiconductors such as silicon and germanium were able to display properties of both conductors and insulators, which made them useful in electronic operations. Germanium was initially used partly because it was easy to work with, but also because silicon was brittle, hard to purify, and unable to be mass produced. In turn, Germanium transistors were invented by John Burdeen, Walter Brattan, and William Shockley in 1947 at Bell Labs, replacing the need for costly and inefficient vacuum tubes (Lecuyer). The transistor was much smaller, more reliable, and provided the same important features of the vacuum tube (“The History of the Integrated Circuit”). Nonetheless, germanium still prompted a problem since it was unstable at high temperatures (“Germanium Transistors”). Silicon’s stability called for the development of a silicon transistor, which was achieved by Texas Instruments in 1954, giving TI a firm reputation that attracted the attention of many emerging engineers, who one of which, was Jack Kilby (Reid

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