What madeleines were to Proust, solder is to McGarrah. “Of course, the most important skill to master was soldering," says Bob McGarrah, now staff system planning engineer at Central Illinois Light Co. Junior engineers constructing projects out of transistors and circuit boards had to hone basic shop skills: measuring, cutting, drilling, and assembly. The things seemed magical."Īnd messy in a way tinkerers love. “The CK722 is the first recollection I have of that transistor type, indeed, of any transistor type at all. “They were the only transistors a kid could easily obtain with saved-up pocket change," he says. At that time, in the mid-1960s, RadioShack sold “blister packs" of five transistors for a dollar. Lee started fooling around with transistors when he was only five. Transistors weren't just sensitive devices, they were the mysterious oracles of a new age-“Just a little solid block of black plastic with three thin wires sticking out," says Tom Lee, associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. I was amazed to find that the transistor radio I built would pick up the local stations without an external antenna and ground like I had to use with the tube radio." “A few weeks later, I got a care package from them with a blue CK722 and a Sylvania 2N35 transistor and a couple books that showed how to hook them up. “I told some of my relatives that I didn't think that transistors were going to amount to much," Hosking told me. (Barre, Vt.), had concluded that vacuum tubes were the only way to go. By the ripe old age of 12, Hosking, now a senior application and design engineer with SB Electronics Inc. The irresistible transistor cast a spell over even die-hard vacuum tube enthusiasts like Terry Hosking. Tens of thousands of CK722s were sold between 1953 and the mid-1960s. I'm tempted to say the PC, but that doesn't quite capture it. “For sheer excitement, I can't think of a parallel with another thing in technology. “I turned it on in my room at night after lights out, and listened to rock and roll or a baseball game," he says wistfully. With his new transistor, Ward built a radio, just a simple tuned circuit with a germanium diode to detect a signal and a CK722 as an audio amplifier. “The blue ones, for instance, the iridescent blue color is just gorgeous." The package is quite spectacular, you know, the actual shape of the device and the color," he says. “They were probably only a couple bucks at the time, but just the excitement of actually owning one of these was intense. (Lexington, Mass.) made available to hobbyists through RadioShack stores starting in March 1953. Recalling himself as a boy of 10 marching into his local radio distributor and plunking down his allowance for his first transistor, Ward taps into the same wonder that gripped him when he laid eyes on the CK722, which Raytheon Co. president, Buddy Holly was flying around on what would be his last tour, and Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor had both filed patent applications for something called an integrated circuit. The year was 1959: Fidel Castro had just taken Cuba, John F. Photo: Jack Wardįor Ward and the CK722, it was love at first sight. introduced the CK722 and slightly better CK721 (less noise, higher gain) in 1953. “Nick can't believe how fast technology changes and that the people I talk to have changed the world," adds Ward, who as curator of the online museum has shifted his focus from collecting early transistors to collecting oral histories from the engineers who sparked the Semiconductor Era. in physics, is learning a lot from his old man. Far from thinking that his dad's a square, Ward's oldest son, Nick, who is pursuing a B.A. “My wife's very supportive, and my younger two children think it's fairly amusing, and probably not a bad way to have a mid-life crisis," says Ward of his family's reaction to his passionate pursuit of transistor history. When he's not working as associate director of quality for the Bedford, Mass., facility of gene-chip maker Affymetrix Inc., he's busy maintaining his virtual Transistor Museum on the Web and is widely acknowledged by fellow collectors as a techno-anthropologist par excellence. He's written one book about the CK722 and has started another about early transistor history at RCA. His stately yellow Victorian home on a quiet, tree-lined street in Brookline, Mass., has a basement crammed with enough code oscillators, Geiger counters, radios, hand-wrought circuit boards, transistorized hearing aids, subminiature vacuum tubes, diodes, resistors, and capacitors to make any collector of vintage electronic gear drool. He's collected thousands of early transistor specimens, including dozens of CK722s. Is it possible to love a transistor? Certainly what Jack Ward feels for the Raytheon CK722, the first transistor sold to the general public, goes beyond casual affection.
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