The very first transistor -- the foundational block which almost all of modern civilization was built from -- was created at AT&T's Bell Labs on December 23 1947. This first transistor was huge and looked nothing like the millions of transistors that you'd find if you cracked open a modern computer chip (which are much too small to see with the naked eye, anyway). While the history of how we got from there to here is very interesting, today we're going to look at something that's normally glossed over: How those clever engineers at Bell Labs actually discovered the transistor in the first place.