Gordon K. Teal

Although the credit of the first transistor goes to Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen of Bell Laboratories the first silicon-based junction transistor was perfected by Gordon Teal of Texas Instruments Inc. This invention dramatically brought the price transistor down and made it an affordable substitute for vacuum tubes of the day.

Early in the 19505 a group at Texas Instruments decided that silicon should be the semiconductor of choice. Up to that point it had been used primarily in polycrystalline form, with the disadvantages that crystal boundaries and related imperfections offered as traps when minority carriers cross the base layer of the transistor. As a result, Gordon K. Teal, who had previously been at the Bell Laboratories and worked there on crystal growing with a colleague, I. B. Little, gained substantial support at Texas Instruments for a program designed to grow single crystals of silicon. The techniques for growing crystals had received a great deal of attention earlier in the century from both exploratory and applied scientists who were interested in the chemical, structural, and physical properties of crystals, particularly in cases where good natural specimens were not available.
After some testing, the Texas team settled on the so-called Czochralski method developed by J. Czochralski at the end of World War I and with it both Teal and Little had experimented successfully at the Bell Laboratories.

This development caused somewhat of a sensation within the trade in its day since it meant that a new level of control of both the chemical and physical qualities of silicon had been achieved and that there would be greater stan­dardization of product.