Transistor

The transistor is an amplifying semiconductor device,

invented in 1948 by John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain,

and William Bradford Shockley, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956.

Before the transistor, the vacuum tube was the main device

for designing amplifiers. The first transistors were contact transistors, soon replaced by bipolar transistors and field effect transistors (FET).

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The invention of the transistor is supposed to have been extremely important. This article doesn't explain why! Also, what does "amplifying semiconductor device" mean? Is someone who needs a definition of "transistor" likely to understand that explanation?