Julius Edgar Lilienfeld | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Lilienfeld,c. 1934 | |
| Born | (1882-04-18)April 18, 1882 |
| Died | August 28, 1963(1963-08-28) (aged 81) |
| Citizenship |
|
| Alma mater | University of Berlin (PhD) |
| Known for | Proposing the concept of thefield-effect transistor |
| Spouse | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | Leipzig University (1905–1926) |
| Doctoral advisor | Max Planck Emil Warburg |
| Other academic advisors | Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff |
| Signature | |
 | |
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (April 18, 1882 – August 28, 1963) was an Austro-Hungarian, and later American (where he moved in 1921)electrical engineer andphysicist who has been credited with the first patent on thefield-effect transistor in 1925. He was never able to build a working practicalsemiconductor device based on his concept. Additionally, because he didn't publish articles in learned journals and since high-purity semiconductor materials were not available to him, his FET patent never achieved fame, causing confusion for later inventors.[1]
Lilienfeld was born to aJewish family in Lemberg (present-dayLviv) in the Austrian part of theAustro-Hungarian Empire. Lilienfeld's father was the lawyer Sigmund Lilienfeld, his mother Sarah Jampoler Lilienfeld.[2]
After graduating high school in 1899,[3] between 1900 and 1904, Lilienfeld studied at theFriedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (renamed Humboldt University in 1949), inBerlin, where he received hisPh.D. on February 18, 1905. In 1905, he started work at the physics institute atLeipzig University as an untenured professor.
Lilienfeld's early career, at the University of Leipzig, saw him conduct important early work on electrical discharges in "vacuum", between metal electrodes, from about 1910 onwards.[4] His early passion was to clarify how this phenomenon changed as vacuum preparation techniques improved. More than any other scientist, he was responsible for the identification offield electron emission as a separate physical effect. (He called it "auto-electronic emission", and was interested in it as a possible electron source for miniaturisedX-ray tubes, in medical applications.) Lilienfeld was responsible for the first reliable account in English of the experimental phenomenology of field electron emission, in 1922. The effect was explained byFowler andNordheim in 1928.
Lilienfeld moved to the United States in 1921 to pursue his patent claims, resigning his professorship at Leipzig to stay permanently in 1926. In 1928, he began working at Amrad inMalden, Massachusetts, later called Ergon Research Laboratories owned byMagnavox, which closed in 1935.[1]
In the United States, Lilienfeld did research on anodic aluminum oxide films, patenting theelectrolytic capacitor in 1931, the method continuing to be used throughout the century. He also invented a "FET-like" transistor, filing several patents describing the construction and operation of transistors, as well as many features of modern transistors. (US patent #1,745,175[5] for a FET-like transistor was granted January 28, 1930.)[6] WhenBrattain,Bardeen, and their colleague chemistRobert Gibney tried to get patents on their earliest devices, most of their claims were rejected due to the Lilienfeld patents.[7]
The optical radiation emitted when electrons strike a metal surface is named "Lilienfeld radiation" after he first discovered it close toX-ray tubeanodes. Its origin is attributed to the excitation ofplasmons in the metal surface.[8][9][10]
TheAmerican Physical Society has named one ofits major prizes after Lilienfeld.[11]
Lilienfeld was a German-speakingAshkenazi Jew who was a citizen of Austria-Hungary[12] and later had dual citizenship in the United States and in Poland.[13] He married an American, Beatrice Ginsburg, in New York City on May 2, 1926. They lived inWinchester, Massachusetts, where Lilienfeld was director of the Ergon Research Laboratories in Malden, becoming a United States citizen in 1934. After it closed in 1935, he and his wife built a house onSt. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands in hope of escaping anallergy associated with wheat fields, from which Lilienfeld had suffered for most of his life. Lilienfeld frequently traveled between St. Thomas and various mainland locations and continued to test new ideas and patent the resulting products.
The prize was established in 1988 under the terms of a bequest of Beatrice Lilienfeld in memory of her husband, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| People | |
