Top Ten Electronic Inventions Stolen From Their Inventors

[@wbeaty]

Yay Lilienfeld! At least he got rich off his OTHER invention, the patent for the electrolytic capacitor. Also, not only did Bell Labs not mention that they were building Lilienfeld's FETs, in addition, they lied to reporters, saying that Lilienfeld's transistors never worked, when in fact, they'd built some, finding "substantial gain." When Bell announced the Bipolar transistor by publishing a research article about it, they also published another article in the same journal at the same time: a successful test of Lilienfeld's FET (a successful test which they later lied about ...besides concealing the fact that this research paper was a Lilienfeld FET which they were testing.) And finally, Bell Labs insisted that Lilienfeld had "just a theory," but never built any transistors. How could they ever know this? Lilienfeld was an experimentalist, not a theorist, and he certainly didn't invent semiconductor theory. And also, Lilienfeld patented and apparently built a working 4-transistor radio in the 1930s, described by an eyewitness, who also said that Lilienfeld showed his device around to all the major radio companies, who (as we might suspect,) had zero interest. The same thing happened twenty years later, with Texas Instruments, when all the major radio companies rejected their "transistor radio." (Who would ever want a miniature radio? There's no market for it!) Finally T.I. found an obscure company, "I.D.E.A" inc., which agreed to do a production run of their "TR-1" pocket radio. Too bad Lilienfeld gave up without waiting for his luck to change. We could have had transistor electronics twenty years early.

[@rayislooking2]

1st LOL I am sure it will be interesting