What If the Transistor Was Invented in 1921?

Her father's hardware store gave her a workbench and, more valuably, no one asking what she was doing with it. By 1923 she had a stable version — three crystals, a bias wire, a casing she'd designed herself out of scavenged brass — that amplified a weak radio signal strongly enough to drive a speaker without a single vacuum tube. She called it a crystal valve, because the word transistor did not yet exist and because valve was the word people already used for vacuum tubes, and she wanted engineers to understand immediately what problem it solved.

No university would sponsor a patent filed by a woman without a degree from an institution that granted them to women. She filed it herself, under her own name, paying the fee with money saved from three years of radio repair work, and waited eleven months for an examiner to even look at it.

The examiner who finally did, a methodical man named Whitcombe who had seen four hundred crank radio patents that year, nearly rejected it as a duplicate of existing crystal detector designs. He almost didn't test the prototype she'd mailed with the application. He tested it only because his afternoon was slow and the device was, he admitted later, unusually well made for a filing with no institutional backing at all.