In the late 40s three American scientists named William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs, announced the creation of the first transistor. The name transistor is a combination of the words transfer and resistor - a transfer resistor - a transistor. When it was announced the name was explained; "because it is a resistor or semiconductor device which can amplify electrical signals as they are transferred through it from input to output terminals." This, the very first transistor was called a point-contact transistor. Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain received the Nobel Prize in Physics 1956 "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect."