Inside the very first mass-produced transistor radio , the Regency TR-1. It beat the Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo TR-55 by a mere nine months. Don't recognise the name? It later became the giant Sony Corporation.

Transistors revolutionised our world immeasurably, galvanising amazing advances in radios and entertainment. Now every home, vehicle, business and hospital has equipment relying on the equivalent of thousands if not millions of semiconductors.

For example, the Apple PowerPC G5 computer has more than 58 million transistors, a high-performance silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process for faster operation, and copper interconnects for improved conductivity. IBM manufactures these processors in a $3 billion, state-of-the-art facility in New York.

The development of transistors didn’t occur overnight. The crystal diode was employed for reception before 1920, while during WW2, solid state rectifiers were used, especially in radar.

Radio engineers and scientists contemplated that adding extra elements to diodes could be the basis of a device with significantly less power requirement than the thermonic valve.

Some saw longer term innovation. Computers were not unknown but were very expensive, space-hungry and underpowered. The ENIAC in 1946 required 300,000 valves and a large room to achieve a performance immensely inferior to today’s PCs.