The environmentalism movement is currently experiencing an injection of perhaps well-needed popularity. Celebrities who own multiple homes that could each comfortably house the inhabitants of small villages, and who regularly circumnavigate the globe in private jets that have a maximum capacity of seven, routinely remind us to do such environmentally responsible things as turn the lights off when leaving a room lest we become wasteful. Manufacturers of products ranging from toilet cleaners to sport utility vehicles advertise their wares as being earth- friendly by arbitrarily adding prefixes like “eco”, “bio”, or “green” to product names in hopes of capitalizing on…

In 1947, three physicists and electrical engineers named William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, employed at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, crudely fashioned a clunky device using paper clips and razor blades, which could control the flow of electric current between two pieces of gold by adjusting the current in a third piece of germanium. This invention, which is now known as a transistor, constituted the world’s first purely electronic switch and is now considered the basic building block for the construction of all machines that process data using electricity. For their pioneering work, Shockley (whose name, by the…