But on the theme of patent validity: Has anyone tried to build a Lilienthal transistor from his patent?
Yes, Bell Labs did successfully. They kept quiet, no doubt to keep
the publicity from detracting from their breakthrough, but the info
was exposed in an old legal deposition from JB Johnson during the
patenting. If you go track down the very first Bell Labs 1948
research paper on the transistor, there's also a paper in the same
journal issue about their testing of a FET, but they carefully avoid
saying this actually had been their test of Lilienfeld's patents.
(This is why business is incompatible with science. When the research
makes the business claims look bad, then the lies start spreading.)
Besides Stockman's report of a Lilienfeld transistor radio, the
article below mentions a grad student B. Crawford in 1991 built
successful but unstable Lilienfeld transistors for his dissertation,
and in 1995 J. Ross built stable ones.
From Bell System Memorial site:
A fascinating letter to Wireless World in May 1981 under this title
came from Dr Harry E. Stockman of Sercolab (Arlington, MA.) Then 76
years old, he had lived through the era under discussion and provided
a valuable summary of "prior art" preceding the re-invention of the
transistor. His letter had been triggered by a "Sixty Years Ago" item
(in the same periodical) recalling an article by W. T. Ditcham on
crystal oscillation in its May 1920 issue...
"Says Stockman, himself a distinguished author of many books and
papers on semiconductor physics:
"(Lilienfeld) created his non-tube device around 1923, with one foot
in Canada and the other in the USA, and the date of his Canadian
patent application was October 1925. Later American patents followed,
which should have been well known to the Bell Labs patent office.
Lilienfeld demonstrated his remarkable tubeless radio receiver on many
occasions, but God help a fellow who at that time threatened the reign
of the tube.
----
Below is paraphrased from "The Other Transistor: early history of the
MOSFET" See pp235-236:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=730824
In 1964 a physicist V. Bottom asked in Physics Today magazine whether
Lilienfeld’s transistors worked, and J. B. Johnson of Bell Labs
responded saying that he’d tested them and they didn’t.
This then is probably the origin of the story that Lilienfeld never
had
any working hardware. An apparently trustworthy physicist (well
known,
of Johnson Noise fame) said so.
Then in 1995 R. G. Arns found a 1948 Bell Labs patent deposition by
Johnson which said the opposite: that Bell Labs back then had a
project
to test Lilienfeld’s transistors, and before Johnson took over the
project, Shockely and Pearson had built a variation of Lilienfeld’s
aluminum oxide MOSFET from his patent and found only an 11% modulation
index, but that "useful power output is substantial" ( ! ) And then
they published a paper about this result. ( !! ) After
Shockley/Pearson’s success, Johnson had tested the other two
Lilienfeld
patents and was unable to replicate them …so Johnson was only
dishonest by omission, by covering up the fact that Bell Labs well
knew
that Lilienfeld had something real. Between these times B. Crawford in
1991 built successful but unstable Lilienfeld MOSFETs as his MS
dissertation, and saw evidence that Lilienfeld must have built similar
devices. In 1995 J. Ross built stable Lilienfeld MOSFETs. In addition
to all this, a 1934 patent by Oskar Heil exists for another thin-film
MOSFET.
The author makes very telling statements about the honesty of these
physicists:
"Published scientific, technical, and historical papers
by these Bell scientists never mention either Lilienfeld’s or
Heil’s prior work."
"Why … did Bell Laboratories personnel fail to
acknowledge the earlier work of persons such as
Lilienfeld and Heil? None of the Bell publications on
transistors carries a reference to their work, not even
the 1948 paper in which Shockley and Pearson
demonstrated the field-effect experimentally. We also
have J. B. Johnson’s 1964 public response to Virgil
Bottom compared to the admission contained in his
1949 affidavit filed in support of patent proceedings: the
1964 statement, by failing to mention Shockley and
Pearson’s 1948 confirmation of Lilienfeld’s US Patent
No. 1,900,018, appears to have been deliberately
misleading. .The official history of the Bell System
electronics work mentions Lilienfeld’s and Heil’s
patents only in endnotes to a footnote. The footnote
speaks of earlier patents which ‘date back to the 1920s’
and states that ‘apparently all attempts to realise these
concepts were futile[33]. In 1988, John Bardeen finally
admitted that ‘He [Lilienfeld] had the basic concept of
controlling the flow of current in a semiconductor to
make an amplifing devicee”[34]. It seems possible that
Shockley et al. had given up on the MOSFET idea
due to surface problems; otherwise the admission, in
Johnson’s affidavit, that the Shockley and Pearson
experiment corresponded to Lilienfeld’s patent, would
not have been so easy. It is also likely that they were
silent and/or dismissive in their own publications and
utterances in order to bolster their patent applications
and to minimise challenges to their priority."
----
One is led to wonder what the 1956 Nobel prize committee would have
thought had they known that Lilienfeld had built a functioning
pre-1940 transistor radio, and that Shockley had avoided referencing
Lilienfeld’s work in Shockley’s 1948 paper announcing that
Lilienfeld’s FET transistors gave substantial gain.
