Conquering the Electron

Dr. Derek Cheung is a scientist turned businessman with a lifetime of experience in the fields of science and technology. He received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in the same field from Stanford. Derek spent four years working as a research engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that gave birth to Silicon Valley, before making a career as president and CEO of Rockwell Scientific, a successful high-tech company transformed from a major corporate R&D lab. He lives in Thousand Oaks, California. Eric Brach is a lecturer in English at West Los Angeles College in Culver City, California. He is the author of Billy “the Hill” and the Jump Hook and has been a contributor to national magazines, newspapers, and academic journals, including Bleacher Report, Box Office, and The Onion. He lives in Culver City, California.

Part I: Age of Electromagnetism
1 The Knowledge Foundation
The Beginning
Scientific Method
The Magic of Static Electricity
The Battery
Linking Electricity and Magnetism
Faraday, the Grand Master
Maxwell, the Peerless Genius
2 The Telegraph
Messages Sent by Electric Current
Annihilating the Time-Space Barrier
Wire Across the Atlantic
Intellectual Property Disputes
Morse Code
Impact
3 The Telephone
Voices Carried Over Wire
Building the Telephone Business
Patent Battle of the Century
Sound of Music
4 Wireless Telegraphy
Hertz and the Electromagnetic Waves
Marconi and the Wireless
Crossing the Ocean Blue
5 Lighting and Electrification
Electrical Lighting Systems
Generators and Motors
The AC-DC War
Impact of Electrification
Edison, Tesla, and Siemens
One Hundred Years of Electromagnetism
Part II: Age of Vacuum Electronics
6 Current Flow in a Vacuum
Cathode Rays
The Electron Exposed
The Puzzle of Penetrative Light
The Legacy of Vacuum Electronics
7 Controlling the Flow of Electrons
The Edison Effect
The Vacuum Diode
The Magical Third Electrode
Voices Across the Continent
8 Radio
Christmas Eve, 1904
Core Radio Technology
RCA and Sarnoff
Armstrong’s Tragedy
9 Television
Transmitting Video through the Air
A Farm Boy from Utah and a Russian Émigré
The Intellectual Property Battle
10 Radar
Clairvoyance
Hunting the Submarine
The Most Valuable Luggage
Radio Navigation
The Microwave World
11 Computer
The Calculating Machine
ENIAC
Foundation of Computer Architecture
Framework for the Future
Part III: Age of Solid-State Electronics
12 The Semiconductor
Bell Labs
Kelly’s Foresight
The Unpredictable Semiconductor
13 The Birth of the Transistor
The Flamboyant Genius
Conceptualizing a Solid-State Triode
Forging a Better Semiconductor
Discovery of the p-n Junction
Roadblocks
The Great Breakthrough
The Roll-Out . . .
. . . And the Fight
Shockley’s Last Laugh
The Zeal of Teal and the Élan of Pfann
Resolution
14 Launching the Electronics Industry
Sharing Technology
New Players
The Debut of Silicon
The Transistor Radio
Japanese Pioneers
The Transistor Era Begins
15 The Dawn of Silicon Valley
Wall Street Journal or Physical Review?
Shockley and the Traitorous Eight
The Birth of Venture Capital
The Changing of the Guard
16 The Integrated Circuit and the Chip
Kilby and the First Integrated Circuit
Hoerni and the Planar Process
Noyce and the Chip
Fairchild and the Silicon Valley Phenomenon
17 Chip Technology Blossoms
The Early Market for Chips
Moore’s Law
Memory Chips
Microprocessor—ENIAC on a chip
The Personal Computer Unleashed
Ubiquitous Silicon
18 Evolution of the Electronics Industry
Competitors from Asia
Computer-Aided Design
The Foundries of Taiwan
Noyce, Moore, and Grove
Turning Silicon Into Gold
19 LEDs, Fiber Optics, and Liquid Crystal Displays
Luminescent Semiconductors
Semiconductor Lasers
Fiber Optic Communications
Liquid Crystal Displays
20 The Information Age and Beyond
Putting It All Together
The Information Revolution
Globalization
Looking Ahead
Appendix I: Further Reading
Appendix II: Summary of Key “Conquerors of the Electron”