Jason Crawford

It didn't work.

That design failed.

It did not produce a very large amplifying effect.

It was orders of magnitude smaller than the theory predicted.

Sometimes I think it was in the wrong direction.

So they didn't know why.

So they went back to the drawing board.

They went back to theory and they said, okay, let's try to understand why this is not giving us the same effect that we predict that the theory would predict.

And one of them, I think it might've been Bardeen, might've been Brattain, I'm forgetting which, said, look, what if something is going on at the surface of the material?

What if the electrons are bunching up in a way or, you know, or sort of like behaving in a way at the surface of the material that's different from the way they behave inside the material?

What if we need to account for this theory?

The theory hadn't accounted for this.

So he came up with this theory of surface states.

And then based on that theory, they went back to the workbench and said, OK, if this is the way it works, let's try to do some more experiments and create a transistor.

And they were doing a number of experiments.

And one of them that they set up because of this, that they didn't even expect to create an amplifying effect, actually created an amplifying effect.

And so here now, whoa.

They'd gotten an amplifier when they weren't even expecting one.

And so this was called the point contact transistor.

And so then to explain why they were getting, you know, before they went to theory to explain why a thing failed.