Nanotechnology: Where science of the small meets math of the large

Device integration increased four orders of magnitude over the four decades from the invention of the vacuum tube triode in 1906 to the Eniac machine in 1945. Two intervening world wars also brought the need for solid state radar technologies and US investments into solid-state physics in the 1930s and 1940s. These events directly led to the understanding of defects, semiconductors, band structure, and ultimately the invention of the Shockley transistor in 1947.