Julius Edgar Lilienfeld

Julius Edgar Lilienfeld was an Austro-Hungarian, and later American electrical engineer and physicist who has been credited with the first patent on the field-effect transistor in 1925. He was never able to build a working practical semiconductor device based on his concept. Additionally, because he didn't publish articles in learned journals and since high-purity semiconductor materials were not available to him, his FET patent never achieved fame, causing confusion for later inventors.