Dr. Walter H. Brattain was born in Amoy, China and raised in the Pacific Northwest. He attended Whitman College in Washington State, and later graduate school in Oregon and Minnesota He studied at the University of Minnesota where he obtained his Ph.D. in physics. He then began work at Bell Laboratories, where he was a distinguished member of the technical staff from 1929 until 1962.
It was during this time that his creativity and persistence assisted the transistor team in overcoming many of the technical obstacles facing them. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics along with his two co-inventors of the transistor in 1956. After leaving Bell Labs in 1962, he worked as a professor at his former school, Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Washington. He was also a visiting lecturer at the University of Minnesota, the University of Washington as well as Harvard University.
Most of Brattain's research was dedicated to examining the surface properties of solids. However, he also discovered the photo effect at the free surface of a semiconductor, and also played an important role in the better understanding of the surface properties of germanium.