Transistor.

Another post on scientific terminology! Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s latest New Yorker piece, “Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made” (archived), has a section on the history of the relevant technology that begins: The original computers were essentially thickets of light bulbs. The basic logic of computing is that practically any set of instructions can be executed by an interconnected constellation of switches that can be turned on and off. Those first computers, developed during the Second World War, evoked the basement warehouses of a chandelier wholesaler. They required a platoon of soldiers to race around replacing bulbs as they burned out. In theory, these devices could accomplish tasks of great complexity. In practice, even a relatively basic job might result in a cairn of charred copper and broken glass. After the war, at Bell Labs, the physicist William Shockley and two colleagues invented a switch that was smaller, faster, and didn’t explode. The…