The Early Transistor Industry outside the USA

Most of the historical research on the development of the semiconductor industry has focused on the USA. This is somewhat unfair to a number of world-class research laboratories elsewhere in the world. Follow the links on this page to find out more about them.

At the time of the invention of the transistor by Bell Laboratories, two English electrical giants had strong research interests in the field:

Standard. Telephones & Cables (STC)
The General Electric Company of England(GEC) , no connection with General Electric in the USA.

Shortly after the invention, another English company, albeit wholly owned by Philips in the Netherlands, decided to enter the market and quickly came to dominate it:

Mullard Limited

In the UK, as in the USA, a number of other companies made transistors for a few years but ultimately vanished:

In the UK military/government sector, one company was pre-eminent:

Ferranti Ltd.

although there was also a common series of semiconductors for military applications that contained devices from many UK manufacturers:

The military CV series

On mainland Europe, activity was mainly confined to Germany where point-contact types were made by Intermetall, SAF, TEKADE and Valvo. There was even one Eastern European point-contact type.

In France, LCT (which I believe was the Post Office's telecommunications laboratory) made a couple of point-contact types. However, a much more historic development also took place in that country. Two German scientists, Herbert F. Mataré and his research partner Heinrich Welker, independently developed the transistor at the Westinghouse Laboratory in Paris just months after the Bell Labs team did in America. This development has only recently received the recognition that it deserves, with publication in the New York Times and elsewhere. I am incredibly fortunate to possess one of M. Mataré's devices , which he named the 'transistron'.

Outside Europe, as far as I know only Japan had a serious research interest at the time, as a result of which they took the lead in the development of transistor radios. The early history of their device manufacturing is obscure, but I know that Sony developed one point-contact transistor, a copy of the Bell Labs type 1698. Information about the early work in the Soviet Union is also very sparse, but they did make at least one point-contact type, probably relatively late in time.

The early development of the semiconductor industry outside the USA is a particular interest of mine. Please if you know anything about this subject.