There was more chance and random experiment leading to the transistor than I expected. I'd kind of assumed the theory and experiments had proceeded in a very definite way. Instead, semiconductor doping was a random discovery they figured out after they'd been mucking around a bunch with semiconductors and just trying to understand their observations.
I wouldn't describe this as "chance and random experiment".
When running experiments in an area where we don't understand what's going on, there will definitely be "weird", unexpected outcomes, which will look "random" precisely because we don't understand what's going on. This does not mean that an experimentalist got lucky and happened to stumble on the right surprise. Rather, I think more often basically anyone running many experiments in a poorly-understood area will see similar "surprises" - the "lucky" observations are in fact extremely likely. But much of the time, investigators write off the mystery to "noise", rather than turning their full attention to figuring it out.
In other words: the rate-limiting step is not stumbling on the right experiment with a surprising outcome, but rather paying attention to the surprising outcome, and trying to figure out what's causing the "noise". (Related: Looking Into The Dark, Science In A High-Dimensional World.) That's exactly the sort of investigation required to e.g. figure out that the "random" conduction properties of chunks of silicon are caused by minute impurities.
You're right and I should have worded that better. The experiment itself wasn't random, though the outcomes might not have been predicted.
I was born and educated thus that I got the solution first: transistors are made with doped silicon that allows current to flow when such and such a field is applied because of holes and electrons, etc., etc.
Implicitly, I'd assumed that the creators of the transistor just had this theory. They knew about current and charge carriers and the electron configuration of different atoms, so they could just combine these and figure out a workable design. It was surprising to methat key parts of the picture weren't theory driven in this way, instead the unanticipated outcome of experiments where they didn't have good theory.
This actually flies against my sense that Bell Labs was able to build the transistor because of their resources and build-up of particular knowledge and expertise they had after 20-years. Possibly their ideas were just getting spread around via their external contacts, or actually, solid-state physics was taking off generally.
Woah, this was striking to me. It seems like pretty big evidence against Bell Labs actually having a secret sauce of enabling intellectual progress. I would have to look into it more, though. (Also the update is tempered by the fact that another argument for Bell Labs' greatness is the sheer number of inventions, like UNIX, satellites, lasers, information theory, and other stuff.)
Epistemic status: these are notes from a popular account filtered through my own existing beliefs. Here, I am largely trusting the book to report true things and not misrepresent them, though, in fact, I suspect the book is trying to create a certain narrative that might be misleading. If I were to get very serious about Bell Labs, I'd have to look at more source material.
Over the years, I've heard various people reference Bell Labs as a place where a uniquely large amount of intellectual progress was made, making it a worthy target of investigation if you're interested in intellectual progress.
A few days ago, I started reading The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. I'm only 20% of the way through, but I've started to note various factors that might explain their output.
Many of the factors that are salient to me were already in my bag of hypotheses and could just represent confirmation bias on my part. A few were surprising. I suppose I should also look for factors I expected to see but haven't yet (look into the dark).
Note: the most significant invention to come out of Bell Labs was the transistor and a lot of the book has focused on that, but they did other notable things too.
Factors Salient to Me