History of semiconductors

[Brian Ellis]

The thread on blimps which got hijacked into LEDs reminds me of another oft-ignored historical event: semiconductor amplification. It is usually Shockley and co. at Bell who were credited with semiconductor amplification as a result of their invention of the transistor. In fact, semiconductor amplification goes back to 1922 when Oleg Losev investigated the electrical characteristics of various crystals. He made various amplifiers and oscillators using zincite crystals with appropriate biasing. He called this the crystadyne and he had them working up to 5 MHz.

Incidentally, he rediscovered Round's LEDs and published 6 papers on the phenomenon, deducing that it was a quantum effect, describing it as the inverse of Einstein's photoelectric effect.

Losev (transliterated variously Lossev and Losseff) starved to death in January 1942 in the Leningrad siege. He refused to leave Leningrad because he was researching some "promising experiments with silicon". Unfortunately, his notes were lost but it is possible that he had actually discovered the transistor, something we shall never know for sure.

[Greebe]

Sounds about right... Bell *cough* invented*cough* alot of things hijacked from other peoples research

[Brian Ellis]

After posting the above, I thought there may be something about the guy on the 'Net. In fact, there is a lot. I found this, in English, at the end of a long Russian paper (sorry about the pagination and punctuation):

Egon E. Loebner in 1976 published "Subhistories of the
Light Emitting Diodes" in IEEE transactions and wrote::
"Light emission from a silicon carbide diode was rediscovered in 1922 in the Soviet Union by Oleg V.Losev.The diode was not an ordinary crystal detector diode,but one sample from a large population of high frequency oscillating and amplifying zinc oxide and silicon carbide detector diodes.
Working under the personal tutelage of Professor Vladimir K.Lebedinskiy,Losev had made a major discovery which led to ten patents and sixteen papers of which he was sole author.He himself built over 50 radio receivers, incorporating his own tuning,heterodyning,and frequency converting circuits.There can be little doubt that this production line of "cristadyne"radio receivers,powered by 12 V batteries,represents a thirty years start over the transistor radio.
Between 1927 and his death in 1942,he published 16 papers and obtained 4 patents on LED's photodiodes and optical recorders of high frequency signals.His experimental methodology is fundamentally the same as that which we used in our own work at RCA Laboratories in 1958 and 1959 on solution grown single crystals of GaP, in order to separate and identify light emission from forward and reverse biased LED's in III V compounds.
I do not share the often quoted humor of N.A.Nikitin, L.N.Saltykov,and other who thought it very funny that foreigners mistook the 22 year old Losev for a professor. To me, irrespective of his age,Losev's papers are indistinguishable from those of a mature,experienced,and skillful experimental device physicist,even though he never received a formal education.In my view,the granting him a
"Candidate"degree (Ph.D. equivalent)without a formal thesis by Ioffe's Institute in 1938 was not an act of mercy. It enabled him to return to laboratory work after a five year "exile"of unproductive physics teachung in a medical school.
In same cases his experimental work was up to 40 years ahead of his time. His research was so exact and his
publications so clear that one has little difficulty determining today what he actually did in his laboratory then.His intuitive choice and design of experiments was simply astonishing."

[az]

It is a shame that the great eastern european and russian cultural and scientifical richness was destroyed by Hitler and Stalin, just like it is sad for me to see germany's greatest heads were driven away or killed during the third reich, a blow neither russia nor germany has recovered from yet.

AZ

[SpiralDragon]

Originally posted by az
It is a shame that the great eastern european and russian cultural and scientifical richness was destroyed by Hitler and Stalin, just like it is sad for me to see germany's greatest heads were driven away or killed during the third reich, a blow neither russia nor germany has recovered from yet.

AZ

fritz lang comes to mind... only when he whent to america his films stoped being any good IMO....


on topic... we russians ... we did quite alot of good things... ....

incase you are wondering... you can ask me in a few days about my ancestory... well just 2 gens ago actualy but i am a very funny mixture...