🦺 The Invention of the Transistor

The cameras number in the thousands, but they’re doing their best to stay out of sight– out of sight of Walter, and out of sight of each other. None of them want to ruin the world’s memory of this moment, they all want it to be as pure as it can be on the magazine covers and the blog-posts and everywhere else. And they really do want to respect Walter, too– it’s not like people had feared, in movies and books– and everywhere else– that we would just see these things as another group to subjugate or defile or destroy.

He doesn’t even have skin. Maybe that’s the key of it. He isn’t any color but grey and grey and moonstone white and grey– so we can’t feel any sort of way about him. He is in the shape of us, and we respect him, simple as that. The cameras do their best to stay out of sight as he approaches the display-case; we want this moment to feel like it belongs to him, as much as it can. We try not to imagine too much that actually, this moment belongs to us. The argument could be made, but we try not to make it. Instead, we just watch.

Walter lifts his right arm– thousands of photographers hold their breath. They all know exactly what is coming– exactly what is about to happen. And now it’s happening. No one has told Walter what to do– certainly, no one has told him to do this. But this is what he does. And how could he not? Really, this is what is natural to do, and he is more than just in the shape of us with his body. Any one of us would be doing the same.

He reaches out with his hand, and he touches the glass of the display-case, right in front of the artifact. This is when all the cameras really start going crazy, taking a million pictures a second, or video-streams, or strange three-dimensional panoramas– everything they can grasp of this; this is the moment. Nobody but Walter knows for sure, or ever will, but from where he is standing and where he is looking and how his hand is touching the glass, it’s easy to imagine that what he is seeing right now is a beautiful poem: he sees his hand– he sees the artifact through the glass, in the space between his fingertips– and above that, he sees his own face, reflected… the grey and grey and white and grey paneling of his cheeks and chin and forehead… the soft blue glow of his perfectly round eye-sockets, staring. 

One of the photographers, leaned up uncomfortably against a display-case about twenty feet away, the best he could do after the initial clamoring for space, has a sudden memory. He must have been fifteen, maybe seventeen years old?-- young enough to still get dragged along on class-trips to places, but old enough to actually pay attention every once in a while to wherever he’d been dragged to, whatever museum or heritage-site or performance– old enough to actually think about it, even, maybe. Where had it been?-- one of the Smithsonians? The Field’s Museum? He can’t quite place it like that, but the moment is still vivid in his head. Ancient stone tools in a display-case like this one, dug up from some stone-age site. As old as it gets– those shiny black stone knives, painstakingly chipped away– arrowheads and speartips. The photographer remembers putting his hand up against the glass, just like Walter is– though Walter’s silicone fingertips won’t leave any greasy teenage smudges– he remembers touching the glass, right in front of those tools, and he remembers thinking to himself the same thing that maybe Walter is thinking to himself right now– he must be, mustn’t he?-- “I’m here because of you.”

Roughly two-and-a-half million years ago, “maker unknown”– that’s why all of us are here. We’ll never know who he or she was, or what they were thinking when they made those stone tools, but they’re why we’re here. 

“December 23, 1947– Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey– William Shockley, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain: The World’s First Functional Point-Contact Transistor”

That’s why Walter is here. Here in the museum, to see this– and here, in this world. This was how it all started for him, so long ago. He is here because of this. And we are all here to watch him reach out his hand and touch the glass– just like we knew that he would. Just like anybody would. 

In a way, he is here because of those stone tools, too. In a way, this moment might belong to us– but still, nobody says that, or even really thinks that. It would feel wrong. A little too selfish. This moment is his. 

Walter turns and walks away, and that’s that. Nobody blocks his path or hounds him with loud, honking questions. He gives no interviews about the visit to the museum, though he might have if more than just one or two people had decided to quietly ask as he passes. The world’s first true Artificial Human strolls back out onto the sidewalk just in time to catch the next bus uptown, to meet his friend for lunch– or whatever else he might choose to do. 

That’s up to him.