Transitron

~ the obit ~

This one is older than anything I can reach for. Transitron was incorporated in 1952 and finished in 1986, so its whole life ran out before I owned a modem, and I have met it through a scanned advertisement and an encyclopedia entry. I am putting it here because the inventory on this site runs thin before 1970 and because the arc is one that keeps repeating in shorter form: a company that was enormous inside one technology and could not move to the next one.

Leo and David Bakalar founded it in Wakefield, Massachusetts, in a state going through an electronics boom. The product that built the company was the gold-bonded germanium diode, which went out by the hundreds of millions through the 1950s and 1960s into computers and military equipment. After that came silicon rectifiers, which David Bakalar claimed were the first in the world, and then grown-junction silicon transistors, and then a catalog broad enough that the bottom of the company's own advertising had to list the categories to fit them in.

Transitron went public in December 1959 with an offering of a million shares at $36 each, and the first week of trading closed at $43. That was the top. By 1986 the company was carrying debt it could not service, and it sold one of its subsidiaries to E. F. Hutton as part of a buyout before stopping operations shortly afterward. No source names the day it ended. The closest thing to a date is the New York Times headline of 30 June 1986, The Demise Of Transitron.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ number two, depending who counted ~

In 1959 Time ranked Transitron the third largest American semiconductor company, behind Texas Instruments and General Electric. Fortune, the same year, put it second, on estimated sales of $40 million. Having two business magazines disagree about which end of the top three you sit at is a good place to be, and almost nobody now remembers this company was in that conversation at all.

The headcount is argued over too. Wikipedia says 1,600 people at its height. The company's own full-page advertisement in a 1960 issue of Caltech's Engineering and Science says more than 4,000. One of those is a company advertising itself and the other comes from a later profile, which leaves the truth somewhere between them. That advertisement is worth looking at for its own sake. It is a photograph of a Polaris missile coming out of the sea, launched from a nuclear submarine, over the line wherever there's electronics, there's Transitron, and underneath, a wordmark and a cable address: TRELCO.

~ after the company ~

The people are the part of this that lasted. Wilfred Corrigan passed through early, years before Fairchild and long before he founded LSI Logic and ran it for two decades, and Nick DeWolf was on the payroll before he co-founded Teradyne in 1960, a company still making test equipment today. Pierre Lamond worked here on a route that ran through semiconductors to Sequoia Capital, where he was a partner for twenty-eight years.

David Bakalar was president from 1952 to 1984, which means he handed over the chair two years before the end. What he did with the years afterward is why his name is easier to look up than the company's. He became a sculptor, seriously and for the rest of his working life, and the two works that get named are Renaissance from 1989 and the 1993 piece with the long title that everyone calls TV Man.

Transitron never had a website and never shipped a consumer product whose name you would know. It is remembered mostly by people who worked in it or bought from it. By the late 1950s this was the second or third largest semiconductor maker in the United States, run out of a small town north of Boston. The proof of that which is easiest to find today is a missile advertisement in a Caltech alumni magazine.

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