The silicon controlled rectifier (SCR) or thyristor proposed by William Shockley in 1950 and championed by Moll and others at Bell Labs was developed in 1956 by power engineers at General Electric (G.E.), led by Gordon Hall and commercialized by G.E.'s Frank W. "Bill" Gutzwiller.
An earlier gas filled tube device called a thyratron provided a similar electronic switching capability, where a small control voltage could switch a large current.