Short answers, pulled from the story.
Electronics is a scientific and engineering discipline that applies the principles of physics to design, create, and operate devices that manipulate electrons and other electrically charged particles. It is a subfield of physics and electrical engineering, using active devices such as transistors, diodes, and integrated circuits to control and amplify electric current and convert it between forms.
John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain invented the first working point-contact transistor at Bell Labs in 1947. This came several decades after the vacuum tube and marked the start of the shift to solid-state devices.
Karl Ferdinand Braun developed the crystal detector in 1874, the first semiconductor device. Its creation, together with the identification of the electron by Sir Joseph John Thomson in 1897 and the later vacuum tube, inaugurated the field of electronics.
The MOSFET, invented at Bell Labs between 1955 and 1960, was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturised and mass-produced for a wide range of uses. It became the most widely used electronic device in the world, with an estimated 13 sextillion manufactured between 1960 and 2018, and it is the basic element in most modern electronic equipment.
The semiconductor industry is the central driving force behind electronics and one of the global economy's largest and most profitable industries, with annual revenues exceeding 481 billion dollars in 2018. The electronics industry also includes e-commerce, which generated over 29 trillion dollars in online sales in 2017.
The semiconductor industry shifted overwhelmingly to East Asia from the 1990s onward, and Taiwan became the world's leading source of advanced semiconductors, followed by South Korea, the United States, Japan, Singapore, and China. The United States' global share of semiconductor manufacturing capacity fell from 37 percent in 1990 to 12 percent in 2022.