The most manufactured thing in history is too small to see.
The first transistor, built at Bell Labs in 1947, was a clumsy lump you could hold in your hand. Today a single phone chip holds billions of them. Humanity has made more transistors than any other object in history, far more than grains of rice.
A transistor is a tiny switch controlled by electricity: a small voltage decides whether current flows. String enough of them together and you can build logic, memory and, eventually, a computer. Every app, photo and message on your phone is transistors switching on and off.
In December 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs demonstrated the first working transistor, a point-contact device made from germanium, gold foil and a paperclip-shaped spring. Their colleague William Shockley soon designed the more practical junction transistor. The three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Transistors replaced bulky, fragile vacuum tubes, and then the integrated circuit, invented independently by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce around 1958–59, put many transistors on one piece of silicon. In 1965, Gordon Moore observed that the number of components on a chip was doubling at a regular pace, a trend later known as Moore's law, which held for decades.
Modern processors pack tens of billions of transistors into a chip the size of a fingernail, with features measured in nanometres, a few dozen atoms across. Estimates suggest humanity has manufactured more than a sextillion transistors in total, which would make the transistor the most manufactured human artefact in history by an enormous margin.
Source: Wikipedia — Transistor · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
