Is it possible to love a transistor? Certainly what Jack Ward feels for the Raytheon CK722, the first transistor sold to the general public, goes beyond casual affection.
He's collected thousands of early transistor specimens, including dozens of CK722s. His stately yellow Victorian house on a quiet, tree-lined street in Brookline, Mass., has a basement crammed with enough code oscillators, Geiger counters, radios, hand-wrought circuit boards, transistorized hearing aids, subminiature vacuum tubes, diodes, resistors, and capacitors to make any collector of vintage electronic gear drool. He's written one book about the CK722, and when he's not working as associate director of quality for the Bedford, Mass., facility of gene-chip maker Affymetrix, he's busy maintaining his virtual museum, http://www.transistormuseum.com.
"My wife's very supportive, and my two younger children think it's fairly amusing, and probably not a bad way to have a mid-life crisis," says Ward of his family's reaction to his passionate pursuit of computer history.
Ward wasn't the only boy smitten. Tens of thousands of CK722s were sold between 1953 and the mid-1960s. The irresistible transistor cast a spell over many boys, thousands of whom went on to become engineers of one stripe or another. Like old high school chums who reunite on Classmates.com and realize they shared a crush on the same girl way back when, dozens of CK722 enthusiasts linked up on the online auction site eBay in the late 1990s and began swapping stories along with vintage transistors.
Deep into a yearlong writing project on the CK722, Ward attended MIT's monthly hamfest. He made known to fellow collectors his eagerness to find out more about the origins of his favorite transistor. "Someone mentioned that they thought Raytheon had a historian," Ward remembers. "So I called up Raytheon and, sure enough, there was one. A gentleman named Norman Krim."
It turns out that eighty-nine-year-old Norm Krim is not only Raytheon's archivist, he's a living link back to the foundations of the electronics industry, a student of Raytheon founder Vannevar Bush, and a roommate, however briefly and fortuitously, of William Shockley, inventor of the junction transistor. He's also the father of the CK722.
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