There are endless stories about Americans being sent to Europe needing to be told that they can't treat black people the way they do at home.
All of the chest thumping about being the land of the free rings hollow when considering how recent some of this history is. The current and previous president were alive when the civil rights act was passed!
There's no question in my mind that American industry and capital markets were far better at pivoting to this new industry though.
Semiconductor physics books require you to work through a lot of material until you understand the diode, and then the bipolar transistor is just one next chapter.
It is not. We've had semiconductor diodes since 1874, but it took many decades to develop the solid state physics to understand how they worked and how to extend them. Crucially, you need some understanding of quantum theory (energy levels, Fermi distributions, etc), which was not developed until the 20s and 30s.
Even after they had the physics down, Shockley still spent over a decade unsuccessfully trying to get a FET to work (due to trapped charges which were not understood until the 50s). This is partially why the experimentalists, Bardeen and Brattain, are quoted alongside Shockley as the inventors of the transistor, even though Shockley had come up with a lot of the theory years before.
In this environment, Shockley, who himself was the child of an engineer and has been criticized as a eugenicist (ie. explicitly not welcoming outsiders, despite his father speaking eight languages, and being born in London), ran a Bell research lab and was exposed to a plurality of emergent military problems to which he applied physics.
After the war, and co-inventing the transistor (probably largely in response to this wartime experience), some of his ex employees including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore split off and started research under Fairchild.
Notably, this occurred right when chemistry was having its moment, and the US had huge postwar capacity to enable innovation. While total industrial production reached 247% of prewar levels during WWII, chemical production soared to 412%.
The group succeeded in 1960. Of the eight who left to found this novel research group, only two were immigrants. Six were educated at elite US universities like Caltech, MIT and Stanford.
While true, this is generally overemphasized. The destruction of industry in other countries helped the postwar US, but the US didn't need that help to begin with to achieve an absurd lead over everyone else.
If we look at 1938, the US still has a higher GDP than Germany and the USSR (#2 and #3) combined. This is just before the war, so everyone has had over 20 years to recover, and they hadn't started bombing each other yet.
Stats based on: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334182/wwii-pre-war-gdp...
The US is massive, has cheap undeveloped land, natural resources, and easy transit (you have a massive river running down the center for barges, along with lots of flat runs for railroads). Compare with Europe, where space and resources are a constant problem, alongside tensions between countries wasting time.
The US was playing the industrial revolution on easy mode, in comparison to everyone else
Eugenics doesn't have anything in particular to say about whether outsiders should or should not be welcomed. It makes a set of scientific claims about how heredity affects people and a set of moral claims about how people should attempt to control these effects.
And still despite immigration reforms and national origin quotas, USA still accepted by far more immigrants during this time period than any other country.
The railroad barron needed cheap labour and didn't give a flying fuck about the KKK clowns marching in Washington.
Why? Mostly because America has true individual freedom and low taxes, unlike Europe.
So yes, it had something to do with WWII, but that's not the only reason.
For instance, Japan and South Korea were both equally devastated and yet they both managed to build world class technology industries in the aftermath.
You are stating that like this has been the state of things for a century. The dependence on American and Asian tech has been a gradual process, that accelerated in the 1990s and 2000s. Before that time, every European countries had their own tech industries able to compete with the tech giants (Nokia, Siemens, Grundig, Alcatel, Thomson, Olivetti, Philips, Ericsson, Amstrad and that's only citing a few of the ones that marked history forever, only in the field consumer electronics, a lot of them back in the day were competing but ended up fading away, and also others were everywhere in the tech industry before without being really exposed to consumers).
