Technically the transistor was invented at Bell labs in 1947

We’ve understood electric diodes since 1874.

Bell labs secured the first US patent for a silicon point-contact transistor in 1948 two years after Soviet scientists proved out bipolar diffusion in silicon. Two ahem German scientists, Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker, developed crystal rectifiers from silicon and germanium during WW2. They extended their discovery into a modern working transistor in 1947, at the Compagnie des Freins et Signaux, a Westinghouse subsidiary in Paris. Tadashi Sasaki pioneered the first Japanese transistor at Kobe Kogyo that same year.

American history loves to casually ignore the global race towards modern machinery, assuming anything that wasn’t filed at the US Patent Office simply didn’t exist.