Walter Houser Brattain

Walter Brattain Photo: Deutsches Museum, Munich

Walter Houser Brattain was born on February 10, 1902, in Amoy (China), he spent his childhood in the Northwest of the United States on a cattle ranch in the Washington state. He studied until 1926 at the University of Oregon. He earned a doctorate in 1929 at the University of Minnesota and then joined the Bell Labs.

His principal interest was focused on the characteristics of the surfaces of solids, and later, the electric rectifier phenomenon and the photoelectric effect. Here he devoted himself more and more to semiconductors. During the Second World War, he worked at the Columbia University on the problem of magnetic recognition of the burdensome German submarines.

In 1956, he received the Nobel Prize for physics together with Shockley and Bardeen. Until his retirement in 1967, he remained at Bell Labs. In 1987, he died in Seattle, Washington at 85.