A tribute: Patrick E. Haggerty: Engineer and visionary: His colleagues remember him with affection and respect, a persistent, persuasive manager who was an inspiration to his associates

For six years after the invention of the transistor in 1948, the development lay commercially neglected. The U.S. military was interested in applying it, but most commercial and consumer engineers resisted any changeover from vacuum tubes. At Texas Instruments in Dallas, the story was different. Patrick Eugene Haggerty, then the company's executive vice president, had caught an early vision of the transistor's potential, and it helped alter the course of commercial electronics.