Walter H. Brattain

A Tonasket raised Nobel laureate, physicist Walter H. Brattain helped invent the transistor (a fundamental building block of modern electronic devices).  He spent a large portion of his youth working on a family ranch, just outside Tonasket, owned by his pioneer parents: Ross R. and Ottilie Houser Brattain.  Whitman rode to his grade school on horseback, five miles each way. When hard times struck during his teens he dropped out of school to work at the ranch.  He attended Tonasket High School for two years (1916-18), but because the school was unaccredited at the time, later left to complete his degree at a school near Seattle.

He later worked at Bell Labs and, along with John Bardeen and William Shockley, invented the transistor. They shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention. He devoted much of his life to research on surface states.