Article ID: CBB000950420

Icons and Electronics (2008)

unapi

In the late 1950s, a wide-ranging debate erupted over the seemingly innocuous question of how transistors---the revolutionary new electronic devices---should be drawn. By forcing a break in the long-standing traditions of electronic drawing, transistors generated a crisis in the ontology of circuit diagrams, forcing a choice between representations that emphasized form and those that stressed function. This paper explores what was at stake in that mid-century debate over visual culture. It tracks one function-based symbol through concerns about auto-comprehension, visual communication, and electronic reliability to see how transistor symbols formed crucial sites for articulating the meanings of material devices and their relationship to the wider populations of electronic entities, especially vacuum tubes. In doing so, the article shifts the emphasis in the history of electronics from material to visual culture, recasting our understanding of postwar electronics as a history of drawings as well as devices.

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Description On the controversy over the iconic depiction of transistors in circuit diagrams in the 1950s, whether to emphasize form or function.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000950420/

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Authors & Contributors
Kaiser, David Isaac
Heiner Kilian
Jens Lemanski
Fuchs, Erica
Khan, Hassan N.
Otani, Takushi
Concepts
Diagrams
Visual representation; visual communication
Transistors
Physics
Electronics
Mathematics
Time Periods
20th century, late
Renaissance
20th century
17th century
Early modern
21st century
Places
United States
Japan
Italy
Germany
China
Soviet Union
Institutions
Radio Corporation of America
Università di Pisa
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