Transistor Informative Speech

What You Don’t Know

You’re likely aware of what makes things happen throughout your day: When you press the elevator button, the elevator doors open; when you answer your phone the internet allows you to talk to and listen to someone on the other side of the world; When you turn the ignition in your car, the engine starts; etc. These are all normal things, and are so ingrained into society that each is practically mindless. What you aren’t aware of is that every single thing on that list used transistors to accomplish the task at hand. If I asked you what a transistor was, what would you say? Nearly everything you do is regulated by some sort of transistor technology: Making coffee, driving to work, using any type of computer or modern electronic,

Jim Handy while working for Forbes estimated that from 1947 when the technology was invented, and 2014 when this study was conducted, 2,913,276,327,576,980,000,000 transistors have been manufactured and shipped. This number is astronomically large, as there are very few numbers that can compare. “How do we understand such a huge number? There are only 200 billion stars in the Milky Way, a number that is less than the square root of the transistors shipped. There are about 100 trillion cells in the human body - that's a 1 followed by 14 zeros, still a far cry from the 21 zeros in a sextillion, or one ten millionth the size. Since there are about 30 million people living in the state of California then the number of transistors shipped would be close to the number of cells in every resident of this state” (Handy). Aside from the sheer number of transistors produced, they are used broadly. This gargantuan number of transistors is meaningless without the effects brought about by their invention. The Internet, for example, is unreachable without transistors. According to The Internet World Stats website, 4,156,932,140 people in the world, just over half of the world’s population, utilizes the Internet. Each of these users required transistor based technology to do so. Another example of the pervasiveness of transistors comes from one of the most influential new technologies, cell phones. This info graphic made

The versatility of transistors is greatly underestimated by most; the transistor is perhaps the most widely used invention of all time. Nearly everything one normally does in the modern world is possible only through transistors. Just some of the countless inventions made possible by transistors are: “Radios…Cars…Phones…The lights in your house…Planes…Cooking appliances…Televisions…Computers…Printers…not to mention the coveted Wi-Fi” (Gaudin). These inventions are integral to today’s society: imagine the inability to travel freely, or the nuances of not being able to access the Internet for information. Transistors are used in applications spanning many fields of use, from computers, to air conditioning. Although these capabilities have only existed for a short period of time in human history, their importance is already unparalleled. This is only the tip of the iceberg on the potential of the transistor. The possibilities are endless for transistors, as they progress, so does the rest of technology. The Intel roadmap gives some insight into the development of the