Gordon Teal’s curiosity changed everything we do. To see by how much, just walk the campus of his alma mater like I did the other day.

Carry a hand-count clicker. Every time a student walks by talking into a cell phone, click. Shortly, you will have a repetitive-stress injury.

Cell phones have changed college campuses like nothing else. Indeed, at times you’d think that college students do nothing else but talk on them or minister to them, eyes down, thumbs blazing.

But, wait. There’s a student, seated under a tree, reading a book. Now, that’s the spirit. As I fawn, his reading is interrupted. Another medium proves more immediate: text messaging.

From iPods to iPhones to laptops to Xboxes, name it, you can credit Gordon Teal for it, or blame him.

Posthumously (he died in 2003), Teal recently got some righteous recognition. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Teal was one of the fathers of the silicon transistor, “arguably the most significant technological development in the 20th Century,” said Steve Eisenbarth, Baylor University associate dean of engineering and computer science.

The silicon transistor made possible devices which could be held in one hand, like that iPhone, which 50 years ago required the whole floor of an office building. First-generation computers used bulky vacuum tubes to send impulses through their systems. The breakthrough changing everything was the transistor, for which William Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics.

Shockley, a scientist at Bell Telephone Labs, might not have pulled it off if not for an inquisitive subordinate named Teal. He made the chemical discovery that boosted the transistor into a global force.

Teal was a mercurial figure. Born in Dallas, he was in a hurry to learn. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in physics at Baylor in three years, in 1927. While there he met a girl from Mart who later became his wife.

Then he got his doctorate in physical chemistry from Brown University.

Out of college, he got a job in New York with Bell Labs, where Shockley was working on his monster development.

Whatever contributions Shockley made, it was Teal, experimenting with crystals down the hall, who identified the substance that made the technology work.

The invention came out of Teal’s fascination with the crystal germanium, which he used to refine a transistor with unprecedented purity and efficiency.

This was just a scientist playing a hunch with a substance which, Teal acknowledged, had no known use. Indeed, he said he “found germanium’s complete uselessness a challenge.”

After time in the Big Apple, Teal felt the call of his home state. In 1952 he moved to Dallas to join Texas Instruments, where in 1954 he developed the first functional silicon transistor, something most of his peers thought was at least two years down the road.

Teal’s singular accomplishment and future contributions helped make TI a giant of the burgeoning computer age.

So, there you have a compact tribute to someone who changed the world by following his curiosity where no one thought it could take us.

Maybe that type of contemplating is happening under a tree near you.

John Young’s column appears Thursday and Sunday. E-mail: jyoung@wacotrib.com.

From iPods to iPhones to laptops to Xboxes, name it, you can credit Gordon Teal for it, or blame him.