What was the first transistor, and why did it change everything?

The answer

The first transistor was invented on December 16, 1947, at Bell Labs by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for it. Their point-contact transistor replaced bulky, fragile, power-hungry vacuum tubes with a solid-state device that was smaller, faster, more reliable, and far more energy-efficient. This single invention made modern electronics possible - from radios and calculators to smartphones and supercomputers. A modern chip contains billions of transistors, each switching on and off billions of times per second.