U.S. Census Bureau Daily Feature for December 22: Electronic Advance

WASHINGTON, Dec. 22, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Following is the daily "Profile America" feature from the U.S. Census Bureau:

ELECTRONIC ADVANCE

Profile America — Thursday, December 22nd. One of the most important inventions of modern times dates to this week in 1947. Three Bell Laboratory scientists successfully tested what would become the junction transistor, vital to our information age. The three shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956. The transistor replaced bulky, fragile vacuum tubes, which generated a lot of heat as they amplified a signal. As a Bell colleague who coined the term "transistor" said, "nature abhors the vacuum tube." The first application that caught the public's attention was the transistor radio. Now, transistors are found in every electronic device that we all take for granted. Today, there are nearly 39,000 electronics-focused stores in the U.S., with sales worth around $87 billion annually. You can find current data on the country's economy by downloading the 'America's Economy' mobile application at www.census.gov/mobile.

Sources:
Transistor development/accessed 10/4/2016: http://www.beatriceco.com/bti/porticus/bell/belllabs_transistor.html
Radio, TV and electronics stores/NAICS 443142: http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/BP/2014/00A1//naics~443142 
Electronics stores receipts/NAICS 443142: http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ECN/2012_US/00A1//naics~443142

Profile America is produced by the Center for New Media and Promotion of the U.S. Census Bureau. Statistics and accounts drawn from cited non-Census sources are employed for illustrative or narrative purposes, and are not attested to by the U.S. Census Bureau. These daily features are available as produced segments, ready to air, on the Internet at http://www.census.gov (look for "Audio" in the "Library" pull-down menu). 

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SOURCE U.S. Census Bureau

Related Links

http://www.census.gov

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