The man who turned the earliest transistor into a practical device, launching a revolution in electronics, has passed away at the age of 91 in Fullerton, Calif.
Morgan Sparks was a researcher at AT&T Bell Labs when he was recruited by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley to help exploit a breakthrough circuit they were calling the point-contact transistor.
Working with fellow AT&T engineers Gordon Teal and John Little, Sparks took the invention and fashioned a low-power variation on it that the laboratory dubbed the bipolar junction transistor, which improved on the work of the original trio of inventors, who were awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering the transistor principle.
Sparks grew up in Colorado and Texas and attended Rice University in Houston and the University of Illinois at Urbana, where he received his Ph.D. for research in physical chemistry. He joined Bell Labs at the outset of World War II, under a national security exemption. He was assigned to wartime projects such as developing batteries that could operate in seawater for electric torpedoes.
After the war, his expertise in semiconductor materials, such as germanium, attracted the attention of Shockley, who was heading a team seeking to create a circuit that could supplant the bulky and inefficient vacuum tubes that had come to dominate the electronic applications of the era.
Shockley's team had invented the original semiconductor transistor in 1947, and Shockley himself developed the junction (or "sandwich") transistor just a year later. Pressing on, the AT&T researchers developed techniques to add impurities to crystals to control the flow of electrons; and by 1951, they demonstrated a tiny microwatt bipolar junction transistor that could amplify a signal 100 000 times its input.
After nearly 30 years at AT&T, Sparks accepted a post as the director of Sandia National Laboratories, one of the United States' most eminent research labs, where he served from 1972 to 1981. Sandia is a key supplier of research and development projects for the American nuclear defense regime under the U.S. Department of Energy.
In a press release issued Wednesday, the current administration at Sandia lauded Sparks as someone who was "a credit to the lab and, true to our mission, provided exceptional service to the nation."
Tom Hunter, the current director of Sandia, said of Sparks: "Morgan was president when I was a young staff member at Sandia. He set the framework for Sandia to become a multiprogram lab. He was widely recognized for his ability to engage the labs in many new areas that proved to be important for our future."
U.S. Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) said of his passing: "Morgan Sparks set the standards for the professional, efficient management of Sandia National Labs. He recognized the future need to brand science into technology transfer, and he laid the groundwork to link defense-based research to applications that impact all our lives every day."
Sparks is survived by his children: Margaret Potter of Waitsfield, Vt., Gordon Sparks, also of Waitsfield, Patricia Fusting of Fullerton, Calif., and Morgan Sparks, of Burlington, Vt. A memorial service will be held in his honor in Albuquerque later this month.
