John N. Shive

Who is John N. Shive?

John Northrup Shive was an American physicist and inventor. He made notable contributions in electronic engineering and solid-state physics during the early days of transistor development at Bell Telephone Laboratories. In particular, he produced experimental evidence that holes could diffuse through bulk germanium and not just along the surface as previously thought. This paved the way from Bardeen and Brattain's point contact transistor to Shockley's more robust junction transistor. Shive is best known for inventing the phototransistor in 1948, a device that combines the sensitivity to light of a photodiode and the current gain of a transistor, and for the Shive wave machine in 1959, an educational apparatus used to illustrate wave motion.