Brattain, << BRAT uhn, >> Walter Houser (1902-1987), an American physicist, helped invent the transistor. He shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics with John Bardeen and William Shockley for discovering principles of electrical conduction in solids that make transistors possible (see Transistor ).
Brattain was born in Xiamen, China. He graduated from Whitman College and the universities of Oregon and Minnesota. He worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories.