outage), and when Dr. Lillehei charged Earl Bakken with developing a
solution, he immediately began tinkering with an idea to provide battery-
powered, rhythmic, electrical pacing.
Recalling an issue of Popular Electronics one year earlier, Earl Bakken
drew inspiration from an article explaining how to make an electronic,
transistorized metronome. To a lifetime fan of electrical gizmos and
contraptions, Earl’s simple challenge was finding a circuit that he could
construct. In the April 1956 magazine article, the simplified circuit
diagram with two transistors was presented, and Bakken cleverly
innovated the amusement into a lifesaving device.
A circuit is an electronic grid, composed of wires, resistors, capacitors,
and transistors. But it is the transistor part of a circuit that has
revolutionized all of electronics, communications, and medicine. The
invention of the transistor is the “central artifact of the electronic age.”^11
The unreliable vacuum tube of earlier electronics was a power hog and
generated too much heat; what was needed was an electronic device that
could amplify an electronic signal that was smaller and more energy
efficient. Bell Laboratories was the industrial research arm of the
American Telephone & Telegraph Company, and as Alexander Graham
Bell’s telephone patents were facing expiration, an intense research effort
to develop improved transcontinental communications led to the evolution
of Bell Labs into the foremost scientific development organization in the
world. Numerous Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Bell Labs
researchers, and numerous revolutionary technologies were developed
there, including the laser, solar cell, communications satellites, and the
transistor.^12 The group that created the transistor was the contentious,
eventual Nobel Prize–winning threesome of William Shockley, Walter
Brattain, and John Bardeen, although none of them monetarily benefitted
from their invention. Shockley departed for Palo Alto, California, where
he founded Shockley Semiconductor, which employed the eventual
founders of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corporation. Silicon Valley
germinated from companies innovating telegraph and radio technology,
and was further fueled by the semiconductor and computer companies that
were founded in the 1950s. Transistors and integrated circuits permitted
miniaturization, decreased energy consumption, and enhanced computing
power, all of which powered the space race, made possible the personal