Bardeen , together with William Shockley and Walter Brattain , invented the transistor on 23 December 1947 . They shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1956 . In 1956 , John Bardeen shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with William Shockley of Semiconductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments and Walter Brattain of Bell Telephone Laboratories `` for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect '' .