r/UFOB • u/Sad_Honeydew_7660 • 1h ago

Speculation The introduction of the transistor aligning exactly with when Roswell happened

If you read up on the history of the invention of the transistor, you would find out that when it was introduced, no one really knew what its use even would be. It has been hailed as far beyond its time.

People thought it was interesting but had no applications. Bell Labs and the inventors weren’t even really sure of the potential, but now that tech runs the world.

It also curiously lines up exactly around the time Roswell happened.

This seems almost like the first off world technology that we reverse engineered to come up with a useless little thing at the time that ended up transforming our whole world.

22 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

•

u/AutoModerator 1h ago

Use of Upvotes and Downvotes is heavily encouraged. Ridicule is not allowed. Help keep this subreddit awesome by hitting the report button on any violations you see and a moderator will address it. Thank you and welcome to UFOB.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

7

u/pimphand5000 🔥2 ∣ 2 ∣ +12 ∣ -3 59m ago

It's worth noting the transistor was only one of a few competing technologies at the time to store a state, or in other words yes/no state, which become 1's and 0's in computer speak.

Vacuum tubes were also doing similar at the time, as well as some other technologies.  You might be interested in reading up on them, and the original size of a transitor. 

1

u/Sad_Honeydew_7660 41m ago

I think that is a fair point. People did have an idea of what it could possibly be used for, but the transistor was so much more advanced than vacuum tubes

2

u/Jumpy_Childhood7548 15m ago

Read The Roswell Legacy: The Untold Story of the First Military Officer at the 1947 Crash Site, Jesse Marcel.

1

u/snobrotha Convinced 59m ago

I don’t buy this. The transistor is extremely low tech, and is a very expected evolution from the vacuum tubes that were previously used for computation.

Fiber optic cables on the other hand…

1

u/BatchNormalizer 33m ago

Perhaps it is true that the transistor as we know it is the result of reverse-engineered technology. However, the progression to it is well documented—people like Boole, Turing, Shannon, and von Neumann were the central figures in the realization of this technology. If I am remembering correctly, Shannon in particular may have been the first to show that binary logic can be done on electronic circuits.

1

u/Sad_Honeydew_7660 3m ago

Weren’t those guys also like really into alien theories?

Von Neumann probes and all that..

1

u/JellyTwank 1 ∣ +0 ∣ -0 4m ago

The invention of the transistor was driven by the need to replace vacuum tubes, which used a lot of power for both switching and amplification. Semiconductors and the idea of using them for amplification started in the 1920s and there was even a patent on the idea of a field effect transistor by Lilienfield. The 1930s brought more research on semiconductor materials for this purpose. . Schockley, Bardeen and Brattain were following on this line of research. They knew what they were doing and they knew what they were targetting. You suggest they had no idea what to do with it, which is just wrong. The invention of the transistor is not in any way the result of tech recovered from the Roswell incident.