Semiconductor History | 463 West Street — The Transistor Announced, and Buried on Page 46

Bell Labs put a giant cutaway model on a stage at 463 West Street on 30 June 1948 and invited New York's reporters to listen to a voice amplified through headphones wired into their seats.

Research director Ralph Bown ran the session, which was long and technical. There was a radio with its tubes replaced, and an oscillator that needed no time to warm up.

The next morning The New York Times gave it four paragraphs at the end of a column called The News of Radio, on page 46, among items about programme sponsors.

It also placed the invention at West Street. The bench work had been done at Murray Hill, some twenty-five miles away in New Jersey, and the first newspaper account of the transistor put it in the wrong state.

The name was new that day as well. John Pierce, a Bell engineer, had supplied it from transfer resistance, following the pattern of resistor and varistor, and it beat the other candidates in an internal ballot.

Bell's own technical readers were quicker than the general press. Physical Review published the papers on 15 July, and Electronics put the device on its September cover.

The most consequential thing about this address is not the announcement but the licensing that followed it, in 1952, under the shadow of an antitrust suit. Bell licensed the transistor for a fee against future royalties, to foreign companies as well as American ones, which is how the device reached Dallas and Tokyo.

That was a licensing regime rather than a gift, and it still did more to spread the transistor than any market ever did.

Bell Telephone Laboratories occupied this full block between West, Bethune, Washington and Bank Streets from 1898 and left it in 1966.

A New York Central freight line ran on an elevated viaduct directly through the building, which is the structure later abandoned and reopened as the High Line, and the second photograph here catches a locomotive passing through it in 1936.

Roger Stevens, the first chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, proposed turning it into subsidised housing for artists, and the J. M. Kaplan Fund carried it. Richard Meier, then largely unknown, ran the 1968 to 1970 conversion into 383 live-work units.

Westbeth Artists Housing opened in 1970 and is still there, still occupied, named for the two streets it stands between.

The buildings are private homes, so the thing to look at is the street elevation and the old gate on West Street, which is what the first photograph shows.

Photo: Dmadeo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (gate entrance, 463 West Street).

Photo: unknown author, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (the Western Electric and Bell Telephone Laboratories complex seen from Washington Street in 1936).