gain of 18 in that trial. In 1956 John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain, and William Bradford Shockley were honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect". Twelve people are mentioned as directly involved in the invention of the transistor in the Bell Laboratory. At the same time some European scientists were led by the idea of solid-state amplifiers. The German physicist Herbert F. Mataré (1912–2011) had conducted experiments at Telefunken with what he called "" (double diode) from 1942, when he first observed transconductance effects with silicon diodes manufactured for German radar equipment for WWII. Finally on 13 August 1948, Mataré and Heinrich Welker (1912–1981), working at Compagnie des Freins et Signaux Westinghouse in Aulnay-sous-Bois, France applied for a patent on an amplifier based on the minority carrier injection process which they called the "Transistron". The device was shown publicly on 18 May 1949. Transistrons were commercially manufactured for the French telephone company and military, and in 1953 a solid-state radio receiver with four transistrons was demonstrated at the Düsseldorf Radio Fair. As Bell Labs did not make a public announcement of their transistor before June 1948, the transistron was an independent parallel discovery and development. Etymology Bell Telephone Laboratories needed a generic name for the new invention: "Semiconductor Triode", "Surface States Triode", "Crystal Triode", "Solid Triode" and "Iotatron" were all considered, but "Transistor," coined by John R. Pierce, was the clear winner of an internal ballot (owing in part to the affinity that Bell engineers had developed for the suffix "-istor"). The rationale for the name is described in the following extract from the company's Technical Memorandum calling for votes: Pierce recalled the naming somewhat differently: The Nobel Foundation states that the term is a combination of the words "transfer" and "resistor". Early conflict Shockley was upset about the device being credited to Brattain and Bardeen, who he felt had built it "behind his back" to take the glory. Matters became worse when Bell Labs lawyers found that some of Shockley's own writings on the transistor were close enough to those of an earlier 1925 patent by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld that they thought it best that his name be left off the patent application. Improvements in transistor design Switch to silicon Germanium was difficult to purify and had a limited operational temperature range. Scientists theorized that silicon would