Julius Edgar Lilienfeld

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Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (1881 – 1963) was born in Lemberg (Now: Lwow, Ukrainian: Lviv) in Austro-Hungarian occupied Poland and emigrated to the USA in 1927.

Among other things, he invented the transistor and the electrolytic capacitor in the 1920s. He filed several patents describing the construction and operation of transistors. Although the devices described in his patents should theoretically work, there is no evidence that they actually did. Despite that, the patents describe many features of modern transistors. When the inventors of the first practical transistor, Brattain, Bardeen and Shockley tried to get a patent on their device, most of their claims were rejected due to the Lilienfeld patents.

Some of his patents:

U.S. Patent 1745175 (describing a device similar to a MESFET)
U.S. Patent 1900018 (A thin film MOSFET.)
U.S. Patent 1877140 (A solid state device where the current flow is controlled by a porous metal layer, a solid state version of the vacuum tube.)
U.S. Patent 2013564 (The electrolytic capacitor)