Gerald L. Pearson
Stanford University
March 31, 1905 - October 25, 1987
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Scientific Discipline: Engineering Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1970)
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Gerald L. Pearson was responsible for many advances in semiconductors during the mid-20th century. Pearson’s research on the modulation of a thin germanium film by surface charges resulted in the discovery of the transistor effect. He worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories for 31 years (1929-1960), and over that span of time, he was issued 32 U.S. patents for his work with semiconductors. Two of his more significant patents were for the Silicon Solar Battery and the Silicon Power Rectifier, both of which helped develop semiconductor technology. His other patents spanned a wide range of semiconductor devices such as thermistors, transistors, tunnel diodes, and Gunn devices. Pearson also published a paper on the silicon p-n junction alloy diode that described the first commercially applicable silicon semiconductor.
Pearson attended Willamette University where he received his A.B. degree in both physics and mathematics in 1926. He then earned his M.A. in physics from Stanford University in 1929. He was awarded an honorary Sc.D. degree from Willamette University in 1956. After several decades working at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he left to pursue a professorship of electrical engineering at Stanford University in 1960. He went on to become the Director of the Center for Materials Research at the university in 1965. Pearson received several honors: the John Scott award from the city of Philadelphia in 1956, the John Price Wetherill Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1963, and the Gold Plate award from the American Academy of Achievement in the same year.
