![]() GE made all things electric and electronic and was already making germanium diodes in the 1940s in addition to an extensive line of vacuum tubes, so the transition into transistors came quite naturally. General Electric (GE): GE was founded in 1892 when Edison General Electric Company of Schenectady, New York merged with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company of Lynn, Massachusetts.He joined Texas Instruments and promptly co-invented the integrated circuit. Kilby left Centralab in 1958 in an attempt to dodge a possible recession-driven layoff. Centralab then started fabricating germanium transistors, focusing on hearing aids, which was a large initial market for transistors because Alexander Graham Bell had stipulated that any company making use of Bell patents for hearing aids would pay no royalties to Bell. In 1947, Centralab hired Jack Kilby and sent him to the 1952 BTL transistor symposium. The proximity fuse design prompted Centralab to develop thick-film hybrid technology built on ceramic substrates, which naturally led to the development of circuit boards after the war ended. It formed an electronics division named Centralab, which made radios and radar-based proximity fuses during World War II. Apparently, the company wasn’t all that particular about what it made because it also manufactured roller skates, automobile spark plugs, and golf clubs. The company started making battery-powered radios in the 1920s and then merged with Union Battery in 1929 to form Globe-Union. The company made large batteries for the electric traction systems in streetcars and rural lighting systems, and to power telephone company switchboards. Centralab Division of Globe-Union: Battery maker Globe Electric was founded in 1912.) Representatives from CBS-Hytron attended the 1952 BTL transistor symposium, and the company was making germanium transistors for IBM by 1953. (Yes that CBS – the Columbia Broadcast System, which brought you I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, and Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. The firm shifted its focus to CRTs after World War II. CBS-Hytron: Lloyd and Bruce Coffin founded Hytron in 1921 to make vacuum tubes.US BTL Transistor Licensees Plus a Few Others (A through M) So, here’s a compiled list of US transistor manufacturers that either attended the 1952 BTL transistor symposium or were making transistors during that period, along with short descriptions. ![]() Look at enough of these online collections of early transistors and you start to build a list of early transistor makers, thus early transistor patent licensees, validated with photos of their transistors. I’ve noted two of these people in the references below. There are many collectors of early transistors from the 1950s, and some of these collectors are kind enough to publish short histories of the companies that made the transistors in their collections. This article and the next article in this series discuss the US companies that did make transistors during the early 1950s. Some of the company names should be familiar to you, and some were completely unknown to me. Some of the names on this list are companies that never manufactured transistors, as discussed in Part 2 of this article series. The list is incomplete because BTL’s own publication says there were 40 licensees by the time this symposium was held and there are only 34 companies on this list. Hanovia Chemical and Manufacturing Company.Automatic Telephone and Electric Company.That was compiled some years ago by Bo Lojek: In Part 1 of this article, I discussed an incomplete list of attendees at a transistor symposium that was held at BTL in 1952. Many articles about the early transistor developments have appeared, but I started to wonder about the earliest commercial transistor vendors. Last November, we celebrated the 75 th anniversary of the announcement by Bell Telephone Labs (BTL) of the transistor’s birth.
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