It is hard to imagine any device more crucial to modern life than the microchip and the transistor from which it sprang. Every waking hour people of the world take their vast benefits for granted - in cellular phones, ATMs, wrist watches, calculators, computers, automobiles, radios, televisions, fax machines, copiers, stoplights, and thousands of other electronic devices. Without a doubt, the transistor is the most important artifact of the twentieth century and the "nerve cell" of our electronic age.

Crystal Fire recounts the story of the transistor team at Bell Labs headed up by William Shockley who shared the Nobel Prize with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. While his colleagues went on to other research, Shockley grew increasingly obsessed with the new gadget. Eventually he formed his own firm - the first semiconductor company in what would become Silicon Valley, spawning hundreds of other businesses and a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Above all, Crystal Fire is a tale of the human factors in technology - the pride and jealousies coupled with scientific and economic aspiration that led to the creation of modern microelectronics and ignited the greatest technological explosion in history.