The cat-whisker detector is commonly described as the first solid-state device, discovered in 1874, patented in the early 1900s, and used in various experimental radios through the development of radio technology at that time.

Its not a "modern transistor design", but its solid state, its through a semiconductor... and its one step away from reliably amplifying. Its kinda funny that the physics to understand this thing were developed after its invention...

Ideas are cheap and worthless - it's the execution that matters. That execution in the context of a patent is a viable product or use.

MOSFETs were NOT viable until the 1960s. RCA made the first practical metal-gate CMOS that is known as the "4000 series" of logic parts. And even then, that technology didn't take off until all the other problems of mobile ions, threshold tuning, etc. were finally solved to give us CMOS as we know it today.

There are always wankers who point to this patent, but it really doesn't matter because it took another 50 years to achieve anything that mattered.

Gutter language does not make the argument more convincing.

This I agree with. Similarly, elitist virtue-signaling like "gutter language" and "among civilized people" aren't compliant with the rules either.

You're free to check.

But clearly, you've picked this hill to die on and this conversation is going nowhere. Have a good day.

I politely disagree.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2001057881A1/en

https://www.ige.ch/en/protecting-your-ip/patents/patent-basi...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/invention

Lilienfeld was a brilliant man but he didn't invent transistors any more than Albert Einstein invented gravitational wave detectors.