About Walter Brattain
Walter Houser Brattain was an American solid-state physicist who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and William Shockley for their invention of the point-contact transistor. Brattain devoted much of his life to research on surface states. Through his studies of rectification and photo-effects on the semiconductor surfaces of cuprous oxide and silicon, Brattain discovered the photo-effect at the free surface of a semiconductor. In 1945, Bell Labs reorganized and created a group specifically to do fundamental research in solid-state physics, relating to communications technologies. Brattain's brother Robert, who followed him at Whitman College, also became a physicist.
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