Brattain

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Walter Brattain was an American physicist who helped develop the first working transistor at Bell Laboratories in 1947
2. The name of an American physicist, one of the inventors of the point-contact transistor that transformed electronics
3. A surname belonging to an American physicist recognized for co-creating the transistor alongside his Bell Labs colleagues

Etymology: Walter Brattain was an American physicist who, working at Bell Telephone Laboratories, helped build the first working transistor, a small semiconductor device that could amplify and switch electrical signals in place of bulky vacuum tubes. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and William Shockley for this work. "Brattain" is a variant of the surname Bratten. Its meaning is not something the source records, so the name's interest lies in the person who carried it into the history of electronics.