Walter Houser Brattain

Brattain, Walter Houser (1902–87), U.S. physicist who helped invent the transistor. He shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics with William Shockley and John Bardeen for this invention, and for the research into the electrical properties of semiconductors that made it possible. All 3 men worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories—Brattain from 1929—where the transistor was first announced in 1948.

See also: Physics; Transistor.