The Russian who invented semiconductors 25 years before the USA | Hacker News Reader

The Russian who invented semiconductors 25 years before the USA

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53 pointsjohncole35 comments

> The semiconductor industry has always had this quality: the difference between a pioneer and a founder is often just access to materials, capital, and time.

This applies not just to the semiconductor industry but almost every industry, especially the ones that don't exist yet.

And to this list I would add: a social and economic system that provides a fertile ground for research, experimentation, immigration and entrepreneurship.

While the US has built up such advantages over the years that they can't all be lost in a manic overnight tweet storm, it's sad and a bit scary to see the current environment, which is much more hostile to all of these things.

Who provides such an economic system?

The US, although much less so recently.

China, with heavy state subsidies, has also proven to be pretty effective. Interestingly, it hasn't had to embrace immigration because it has over a billion people.

Do Chinas state subsidies encourage innovation?

This story is a great example of the system taking a brilliant person, and stomping their opportunity down because they were from the wrong class. But replace class with whatever you like.

They do actually. There’s a fair bit of critique you can level at the system from a country-wide economic perspective and especially from a world-trade perspective, but they did manage to get a system in place where a central government can influence both the area and speed of innovation.

The main thing they do is stack the market to be very favourable for a given industry and then have extreme competition between the companies.

Extreme subsidy between the competitors.

They not only encourage innovation but also cross-pollination too. So say you discovered some minor technology, they'll even help you connect with other folks who work in the space, potentially combine the innovations together to create a new final product that can actually be licensed to OEMs.

Where I find China lacking is in creativity and imagination. Yes, there are some changes in that front happening, but you'll never find OpenAI, Helion Energy or SpaceX being founded in China. Those projects won't even get the greenlight from the CCP to get started off the ground because of their high capital and startup costs.

Dictatorships are always more efficient in the short run.

Some of them. Turkmenistan isn't doing that great.

The only thing the state needs to do is

Infrastructure Education Political stability

Individuals will do the rest.

As we know the CCP-for all it's faults- has provided all of the above.

It provided the above to a select few that thought the way they were supposed to. It also did NOT provide to a few million that didn’t think the correct way.

Counterpoint on China - they will import special talent and help them immigrate. And of course, there are people who'll value the lifestyle of Shenzhen over San Francisco, or Shanghai over New York. One example that comes to mind is Dr. Erdal Arikan.

They will never be Chinese or considered Chinese. Has China become more welcoming to foreigners lately?

Most foreigners don't really want citizenship and are content being expats. The ones who do want citizenship are often from countries with weak passports, which often means weak infrastructure, poor HDIs and usually not that much of a skillset that they can bring to the table.

The early discovery of light emission from silicon carbide long before the first LEDs is a very interesting finding, worth pointing out.

But alas, as ever so often, the article turns this into a hyperbole. The premise from the title does not check out at all.

>The Russian who invented semiconductors 25 years before the USA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor#Early_history_of...

I probably over exaggerated there. But it does seem he was earlier than the team that’s been given credit for it, no?

Great article!

Yeah, that pattern can be seen everywhere in semiconductors. E.g. the transistor invention vs. Lilienfeld, Heil, Matare etc. So the scope is more narrow than "Inventend Semiconductors".

Generally, there seems to be a tendency to disregard discoveries from outside the US. I think this pattern can still be observed today...

Other examples: Invention of light bulb, telephone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Losev#Solid-state_electro...

has quite a bit on it checking out:

> He used these junctions to build solid-state versions of amplifiers, oscillators, and TRF and regenerative radio receivers, at frequencies up to 5 MHz, 25 years before the transistor. He even built a superheterodyne receiver.

That one calls them "negative resistance diodes" but I don't see how you can make a functional solid state amplifier and the like without it being a transistor.

Maybe Wikipedia needs some edits.

The USSR famously invented everything the west did but years or even decades earlier, only for some reason never commercialised any of it, to the point where it became a bit of a running joke like the Su-24 "validating" the design of the F-111 which preceded it by some years. So I'd take any claims like this with a bit of a grain of salt.

There's always someone somewhere who, with hindsight, did something that could be retconned into being similar to something important we've got today, von Däniken being an extreme example. Not putting down Losev's work, but accidentally stumbling on an interesting physical effect that you treat as a curiosity and engaging in targeted research to turn in into a product is a very different thing. For example the FET was envisaged multiple times in the same time frame as Losev's work, but wasn't rigorously pursued until Bardeen et al came along.

His death at the Siege of Leningrad sounds a lot like Archimedes death at the hands of a centurion during the fall of Syracuse to the Romans. That death was told by the always reliable Livy.

I think there's likely many things even today, hidden papers, that discovered things, that no one has really decided to give it a shot and try, or figured out what can be done with it.

Thus is the crime of the communist Russia: forcing millions into hard labor to die for progress yet squandering innovation for ideological reasons. But the same mechanism is there in, say, Microsoft. To get the attention of leadership, your idea must have 9 zeros at the very least. If it doesn’t, you either leave M$ or stay there and abandon your idea. But a 7-zero idea is a pretty expensive one to be abandoned.

I don’t think Microsoft is sending people to the gulag because they didn’t have enough zeroes behind their idea.

Their digital Gulag is called Windows and they're forcing most PC users to this abomination of operating system.

Walking away from Windows means using Linux or Mac. Walking away from the actual gulag was considerably harder.

> "He was 38. Shortly before his death, he had mailed a manuscript describing a new three-electrode semiconductor device to Physical Review. The paper was lost in the wartime Atlantic. Five years later, Shockley, ..."

I wish the article had a reference for that claim.

I remember from my childhood that my father told me that in the old soviet system, publications from were invented and dated back in order to demonstrate the superiority of their science. Both sides might have done it.

Now, a story from my father is not strong data point. But falsification of scientific theories, statistics and publications was a thing in the Soviet Union [1,2].

Then again, the guy might have really done it.

[1] https://communistcrimes.org/en/falsification-memory-history-... [2] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/33071/how-often-...

Fascinating, that’s really interesting.

Yup, that was definitely a thing, see my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451474.

We will never know the whole truth as that specific culture typically bend the facts and there are little to no proofs of the claims. During soviet era the narrative was that Russian scientists (soviet elites always preferred Russia over other republics) are behind most of human scientific advantages and others simply steal from them.

Favorite claim they made?

USSR would be nothing with Ukraine SSR doing the heavy lifting. Russia was just the parasite on top of them.

Yeah, they are even struggling to make ballistic rockets now without the access to Yuzhmash

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivdenmash

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