The Transistor Story

Transistor is on of the most important inventions of the 20th century. It is one of the most common elements of electronic circuits today. This article is dedicated to the story behind the invention of transistor. 

An old Swedish telephone from year 1896

The need for communication is indeed a primitive one. Ancient tribes had foot runners for conducting their messages, some trained pigeons to carry scripts for them. Then the kingdoms rose and cavaliers were born and then came the post and telegram. The first change in our way of communication was brought about with the invention of radio. But the story of transistors begins only after another great invention that came about in the year 1876, telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and brought about a revolution in communication technology and it was the Bell Laboratories that would ultimately lead to the birth of transistor. But that is for later. By 1907 AT&T, a telephone company founded by Graham Bell was facing a tough competition for leadership in the industry. The operation of telephone had not changed much by then and the technology for long distance call simply did not exist.

The greatest problem that the telephone faced was the need for amplification. As the telephone signal was conducted through copper wires the signal weakened and could not be carried to significant distances. Hence, no telephone operator could conduct a call from the east coast to the west coast of the USA. This led to a race among the telephone companies for finding technology to achieve the feat. AT&T invited anyone with an idea to contact them. One person who did contact them was an independent inventor named Lee De Forest.

An award containing a replica of the first transistor

In 1906 De Forest had invented something called the Audion. It was the first of three element vacuum tube which was primarily being used as a radio wave detector. Though this device provided amplification it was not enough for the needs of AT&T. The solution was brought about by creating a better vacuum in the Audion. This was the first useful amplifier in the world. Using this device, in 1914, AT&T was able to complete the first transcontinental line.

Though they led to great achievements, vacuum tubes had great problems too. They were power hungry, they heated up very quickly, and they wore out and had to be frequently replaced. With all these problems at hand AT&T set up the Bell Laboratories to find a solution. The problem, it was concluded, was the vacuum. Hence they decided to create a solid state device to replace the Audion.

During the World War II the Americans were already using semiconductor diodes in there radio devices and the science of Quantum Mechanics had also taken a great leap. They saw their solution in this scheme.  With conditions in favour of electronics the scientists at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories set out with a daunting task, to make an amplifier using semiconductors.

John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain

The head of the department was William Shockley. Out of the other great minds in the project two important people were John Bardin a theoretical physicist and Walter Braton an experimental physicist. On December 16 of the year 1947 after more than ten years of relentless effort for the first time in history they were able to amplify an electrical signal using a solid state device. On December 23rd they demonstrated their device to fellow scientists and that is how the transistor was born.

(Inspired by a BBC documentary I had originally written this piece for our college magazine but the editors of the magazine weren't interested. Didn't know what to do with it so posted it on the blog. I hope that you will like it.)

Further Reading:

The Wikipedia page dedicated to transistor

Understanding The Madness

According to the 2011 census of India the number of females per 1000 male in our country is 940. This is unfortunate, yet one may find prospect in the fact that this is not a fall but 7 point rise when compared to the census of the previous decade. I for once saw hope in the news but that was until I went beyond the headline. There is one fact stated in the census report which must be heeded to and that is that the number of female children per male child fell drastically through this decade.

Why is it, one wonders, that there is such inequality in our society.  Why is it that after fighting successfully with foreign rulers for centuries we are falling to malice that our own culture has acquired for itself. Why is it that in today’s world of equality we are still obsessed with the desire for a male child? How can a woman who has felt her offspring in her womb get rid of her upon knowing that she is a girl? How indeed. Let us explore for their purposes.

A desire for son is innate to most sections of our society. It is a will that many people openly express. It is so commonly accepted that in a recent case a judge was reported saying that it is acceptable.  The reason being that in most parts of our country a patriarchal system of inheritance is followed where only sons retain the property and the name of their father. There are a few exceptions of course but none in significant majority. Therefore preference to a male child seems like a strategy for preserving the family name.

The social setup in India is such that it is a son who has the responsibility of his parents in their old age. The idea of living with a daughter and her in-laws is simply too imprudent to even consider for most parents. With income as limited as it is in our country saving for retirement is mostly not an option. For this reason most people who are unable to produce a male heir are either forced to work through their old age or to compete for old-age homes. A male child thus is a retirement plan and a daughter simply doesn't fit.

In our country where most people still live below the poverty line, children are often no more than an economic choice. A son can earn his share of bread and more from early days of his life whereas after a certain age daughters, who are not allowed to work because of backward conservative mindset of parents, are commonly accepted as burdens. Thus for many in our society having a girl child is an economic disincentive.

The most important among these factors perhaps is a curse from our past that still haunts millions of women through their life and through them their parents. Yes dowry, the socially accepted form of human trade in our culture, is perhaps the most unforgiving of all the reasons. It is because of this that many families kill their newborn or unborn daughters in fear of the grave financial misfortunes that her marriage would bring along. Whereas a son simply by his marriage can pay a lot of bills and thus the greed makes them covet.

Upon observation we find that there is some rationale in the unjust preference of a son over a daughter. There is some logic, no matter how horrid, behind the gruesome murder of a daughter. And thus there is a plausible reason behind the falling child sex ratio. There is no doubt that the number 914 to 1000 is a taint on the values of the nation. We need to rise and work towards an unbiased future because such an imbalance as this is dangerous for the country.

There are laws in India that were intended to rid us of these evils. There are laws, no matter how lax, that were intended to stop foeticide. There are also laws that were intended to stop the practice of dowry. But the thing worth marking is that there seems to be a lack of will among the administrators and police for implement such laws. This is because they too are a part of this biased society that has dual standards for the sexes. For them to change we the society have to change.

We must remember not to separate the cause from the consequence. Working towards stopping female foeticide would be unfruitful if we do not work towards eradicating the causes behind it. We must first work towards stopping the practice of dowry so that then we can work towards equality. For without equality we can only check the nuisance but we can never stop it. It is only through impartiality between the two halves of the nation that harmony can be achieved.


Further reading :
Dowry laws in India
Satyamev Jayate episode that features foeticide

A Person of Power

Hillary Clinton is in India and that is not the issue. What makes an issue, however, is her choice of person to meet during the visit. As you may have already guessed the person I am referring to is Mamata Banerjee. In today’s politics Mamata’s name is synonymous with authority. She is the leader of perhaps the most important supporting party in the UPA and thus holds a say in state policy like no other person does. She is truly a person of power and that cannot be doubted but what is in doubt is whether she is worthy of it.

Earlier this year an Indian delegation headed by Prime Minister himself visited Bangladesh to resolve the Teesta water sharing issue. Another highly important issue that was to be discussed was of Bangladesh providing India with a railway transit through its land to better connect the North Eastern states with the mainland. Mamata Banerjee was to accompany the PM on his visit but refused at the last moment. She also stalled the agreement thus raising anti-Indian propaganda in Bangladesh.

Mamata is not a responsible person and that is starkly visible in the railway budgets she presented as a minister. Much like her predecessor her idea of a budget was centred on her home state of West Bengal. She completely ignored her duties and responsibilities towards Indian Railway and thus India in order to strengthen grip on her state politics. On a number of occasions she and her party members have been reported voting against the government they support as if playing a power game.

It is really amazement to mark how she enjoys the lime light and the sport. A mention of Nandigram, where she caused more losses to the state then repairable, should be enough of a reminder. I remember how she charged after Dinesh Trivedi for proposing a fair hike in the railway budget. The move revealed the populist nature of her politics and on it someone rightly commented that Mamata was “economically illiterate but politically astute”.

The statement that is perhaps the most befitting is that Mamata Banerjee is not a person who can be trusted to do the right thing for the country yet she is a person with much influence. She is the one who has been a part of both the NDA and the UPA governments and whichever the next is she is bound to be a part of it. This also explains the United States’ interest in her. It seems to be looking for a broker for FDI in Ms Benerjee.

Whether or not Ms Banerjee accepts the job is not important what is important and thus must be noted is that the United States is interfering in our country’s internal affairs. Take two things as my conclusive points for my article. Firstly, think twice before voting for Mamata Banerjee for she is a fair way towards turning into a dictator and secondly take offence in whatever the United Stated is doing as they cannot be allowed to run our country.

Further Reading :

Hillary meets Mamata

Mamata sabotaging India-Bangladesh talks

Trinamool MPs vote against key government bill

How Mamata may be turning towards tyranny

To Be A Freedom Writer

A free media is the true essence of a democracy. It is the tool that empowers the people to speak up against tyranny, to protest against the wrong and bring the undeserving down from power. When our union minister of Communication and Information Technology Mr. Kapil Sibal announced that he would introduce a new scheme for pre-screening of material on social networking sites he reminded me remarkably of Lord Lytton.

In the year 1878 Lord Lytton the then Viceroy of India had passed an act that became a word in the history of the nation. Since the Independence of the India generations of children have read of what was then titled as The Vernacular Press Act. The law was intended at restricting any content in all print media which could do harm to The British Raj. The act brought down restriction upon right to expression so that the Raj could spread ignorance and thus exploit the people.

It seems that the congress government is irked enough by indecent photographs of their leaders over the internet of propose a law to stop them. The event comes to reveal that UPA government is more concerned by their worsening image that the reasons that cause them. They would rather kill the protest, than kill the inadequacy of their measures in steering the country and all the while they say it is a fight against people who spread religious hatred through such sites.

Kapil Sibbal - the man behind the proposal

People who spread religious hatred in the country must be stopped and punished. The act itself is of the most heinous kind. But do we surrender our rights in order to do that. Are there no other preventive measures to accomplish that? How about prosecuting the people who bring such hatred and bringing them to justice. Why don’t we use the established medium of networking sites to allow the users themselves to report perpetrators to the government?

 Well I don’t think that would happen since the congress government clearly isn’t interested stopping such attempts they simply want to have a hold on the web so that they can stop the political propaganda against the UPA and thus was revealed by the sites themselves. According to facebook most of the request to bring down content concern political leaders and only a handful concern other issues.

This sudden act by the government made me wonder. Does this provocative attempt of invading people’s privacy show the government’s ambition of incorporating the worst of China in India or is it simply a measure to divert focus from their other failure in governance? Whatever be the case we should keep in mind how our freedom fighters fought against such oppression. They protested till the Vernacular Press Act was dropped by a subsequent Viceroy. If the need be we should do the same and become freedom writers.

Further reading :

Economic times article on the issue 

A BBC article on the issue  

A Hole In The System

Anna Hazare

When Anna Hazare started his agitation against corruption for the formation of the Jan Lokpal Bill I became a supporter of his movement. In a country that has lost more to corruption than to war it seemed like a very sound initiative. But it was not until the government’s proposal of the bill and the debate over it that I truly realized what was at stake and it is way more than getting some stray politicians into jail, it is a battle for India’s soul.

Let me begin my post with what I believe about systems. Firstly any system must be strong and efficient in order to perform its intended job. Secondly, any system that involves humans has a potential for corruption. And thirdly, any system that has been corrupted must be brought down. Hence all administrative system as per my belief has a fraction of corrupt in them, thus no system must have supreme authority so that the corrupt in them can be brought down.

When our people and media reflect on the idea of Lokpal they seem to hold an image of Nehru capped Gandhians who would never do wrong. They seem to forget that when Lokpal becomes a constitutional body it is bound to outlive Anna Ji, Kiran Ji and the even the youngest of Indian children born today. They seem to forget that other than being a setup for bringing down corruption Lokpal itself is an administrative system constituted by humans.

Complete power can thus never be given to Lokpal no matter how much Anna Ji and his humble hearted followers call for it. Just think about it, Anna’s idea of Lokpal seems to be that of a body which has the power to investigate by undertaking CBI and the power to prosecute in a court of law that itself is answerable to Lokpal. In such a situation can any decision ever go against that of Lokpal when the Judiciary itself is its under pressure?

As if to make the image even more horrific the team intends to put the most important of India’s offices under the ambit of Lokpal, the Office of the Prime Minister of India! As if the judicial encroachment into Legislative turf was not enough, you now intend to put the PMO under the whims of an all powerful potential monster. This never fails to remind me of how the Titans were brought down by their sons.

I felt sad when I saw our political parties reel under the pressure of the misinformed populace. Anna is a patriot but does he hold enough wisdom to choose what is right for the future of the country. And even if that were true last time I checked India was a democracy not mobocracy or monocracy. It is true that we need a Lokpal and that it needs to be strong but it must be answerable to somebody.

There can never be a single answer to this call for a corruption free society and existence of bodies like Lokpal is essential. But creating a single body that has all the power and responsibility to tackle corruption would be like creating a Kraken. Every system must have a hole. And our government must make one by creating different powerful bodies to tackle corruption at different levels. We must remember that a fight against corruption is a never ending one and no harsh steps must be taken which may jeopardize the state of the nation.

Further reading: 

Anti corruption movement

Remembering The Ghosts Of Past

The transfer of rule of India, 1947

Quiet a long time has passed since that fateful stroke of midnight hour when India became independent. Many generations have come to be since that night and in this due course of time we have witnessed a great leap of hope for future in our country.  We are a generation that has not known bondage like others and this natural feel of independence has had its implications on our world view. Today we expect more from our nation and do so quiet rightly. We aspire to equal and surpass the west and thus often compare all our achievements with theirs. But when we view our failures in some fields and engage in criticism we quiet conveniently ignore the hardships and the history that has brought about this present for our nation.

Surrender of Pakistan, 1972

Ours was not an easy ride. When we started off in the fifties after the chaos of liberation we had found ourselves on shifting sands. We had an non-integrated nation riddled by wounds of partition and plagued by centuries of regionalism. The greatest worry of our government was the disintegration of the state not to mention the widespread poverty, illiteracy, famine etc. Socialist policies of Nehru Ji didn’t help much either but through the decade he managed to keep our young nation from falling apart.

Indira Gandhi in Pokhran following nuclear tests, 1974

After the war of 1962 was lost, as if to manifest the nation’s state, our then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri had severe heart attack. Through the decade our country struggled to manage food security until after much effort the green revolution was brought about.  In the following decade Smt. Indira Gandhi turned us to the Russians for support during the 1971 war. Following this we conducted the operation Smiling Buddha (Pokhran 1) and multitudes of sanctions were imposed on us and some of them were not revoked until 2002. Indira ji went on to force socialism on the country and we ended up in a political turmoil.

Seventies were also the decade when the secessionist movements rose to great heights in our country with problems in Punjab and the North East. The Naxal movement which persists even today is a child of those times. Then the assassination of Smt. Gandhi in 1984 saw the rise of riots. Mr. Rajiv Gandhi took over after her mother and in his reign we faced turmoil because of the Sri Lankan peace force episode.

The early nineties saw the economic fall out of the country as Soviet Union, on which we were greatly dependent, collapsed. While the rise of small regional parties brought in an era of coalition governments, riots based on religion were also a dominant theme in the decade and it was not until the beginning of this millennium that we saw some stability in the country.

India has progressed despite all the hardships and this is not an excuse. We have every right to be unsatisfied with the work not done and to point out that every nation that stands has had its fair share of troubles. My intention in this post was not to overwhelm you with history. My only intention behind this article is to point out that there is a long past behind what is, and being critical of today without knowing yesterday is the most unfair thing we can do to the memory of our predecessors.

I remember watching an old Bengali movie once when I was very young. The memory is in patches and this is as much as I recall. It featured the story of a village focusing on the family of a school master and his wife during our 1962 war with China. The movie showed how the teacher was unable to manage even a fistful of rice to feed his wife as there was a shortage of food all over. In hunger they had to try every way to manage food. His young wife eventually had to involve in a physical relationship with a resourceful person to feed her family. The movie captured the true desperation of the time and left a great impact on my young mind. I urge us to never be forgetful of those days.

Further Reading:
Wikipedia: Brief history of post independence India 

The Environmental Hypocrisy

The reactor plant under construction at Kudankulam

Do you know without whom the world would be better? My answer to this question would be environmental activists. These peculiar breed of humans do not believe in letting the system work. Though they often work for environmental causes but most of the time their work is not inspired by belief in cause rather is a search for importance in a world which can run perfectly well without them. Their plan of action consists of finding anything worth protesting on and then misleading the innocent to join their madness. I am frustrated by their acts of hypocrisy especially when it comes down to energy.

These activists are the people who fill in our books with environmental need for non exhaustible resources; they tell us how the potential of our Himalayan Rivers are yet to be tapped. Then the go and start the Tehri dam agitation, the Narmada bachao movement, and the Save Ganga campaigns. I do believe that they are justified in their fears about the environmental costs of the projects and the resettlement of people but is it something that should come at the cost of national development?

Yes wildlife was lost when Tehri dam was constructed but then read about Itaipu and find out how little is the loss when compared to the Brazilian project. Still not ready to bear the environmental cost? All right maybe we will switch to some other form of energy with less environmental impact. Well I think even the government would agree... but hey do the activists agree? News flash: no they don’t and we have a Kudankulam at hand. This time they protest over the risk of an accident, a Fukushima or Chernobyl!

Protesters outside the Kudankulam project site

Now I would like to ask them should we stop building sky scrapers just because they may fall in a massive theoretically possible earthquake. If that be the case let us build huts in the future. Now we can’t even do that can we? Otherwise they will call us slum dwellers and cite India as poor. They always tend to argue that there are  alternatives but when you go for the alternative you end up with them citing another problem. I think I’ll mention all the energy resources and the problems they associate with them.

Resources                   Problems

Hydro power            Loss of wildlife, displacement of mass population, safety of dams.

Thermal power         Air pollution, depletion of coal, health issues.

Nuclear power          Nuclear safety, waste disposal problems.

Wind energy            Now this one is interesting. Apparently looking at the shadow cast by the fan of a windmill for a long time can drive people crazy. The bird and bat death, and a mysterious health problems termed wind-turbine syndrome also occur due to windmills.

Solar energy            Solar panels consist of toxic materials, electronic waste disposal problems, not to mention the huge cost-efficiency deficit.

Geothermal energy    As of now not sufficient to run a country. Also the technology is still far away in a land not known to man.

Tidal energy             Anchors destroy ocean bed ecosystems, disrupt fish migration routes, also there are limited places to install such projects.

Bio-gas                   Methane is a very high grade green house gas. There are safety concerns and limited production issues and if you are seriously thinking of running industries on bio-gas then imagine the number of cattle required to generate so much of feces.

Conclusion: If environmentalists had their way we would be living in dark ages. I understand all your concerns but you need to understand mine. We have to get rid of our dependence on coal and we need hydro electricity and nuclear electricity to fill in the gap. Then we may phase in other forms of energy production once problems related with them are sorted out. Even the microphones that you use to shout slogans against the government require electricity (not to mention they cause noise pollution). So either live in a house without any electric appliances or stop misleading the people and cut the crap!

Please do not mind the informal use of language.

Further reading:

A Wikipedia page on Tehri dam agitation

A Wikipedia page on Narmada bachao movement

A NDTV article on Protests over dams on River Ganga

An article Itaipu dam construction

A Wikipedia page on the Fukushima disaster

A Zee TV article on the Kudankulam protests

A Wikipedia page on problems poised by Wind power

An article on problems poised by Solar energy

An article on problems poised by Tidal energy

An article on problems poised by Bio-gas