[gary]

If the metric of a success of an invention was how many times it had been
made, then the transistor would have few peers.

Encyclopedia Britannica says, "They are by far the most common human artifact on the planet".

And the volumes by which we are making them is growing exponentially every year.

Here is a partial chronology.

Originally Posted by National Research Council, 1999

[In 1999] Gordon Moore of Intel was fond of saying :-
"Every year more transistors are produced than raindrops over California,
and it costs less to make one than to print a single character on the page
of a book." "Every year there are more transistors manufactured than
printed characters of any type - newspapers, magazines, books, and copies
of documents. There are about as many transistors made each year -
10**16 to 10**17 - as there are ants on the entire planet. Put still
another way, each year the semiconductor industry makes 10 million
to 20 million transistors for every person on Earth."

Originally Posted by Dan Hutcheson, CEO of VLSI Research, 2014

In 2014, semiconductor production facilities made some 250 billion billion (250 x 10**18) transistors. This was, literally, production on an astronomical scale. Every second of that year, on average, 8 trillion transistors were produced. That figure is about 25 times the number of stars in the Milky Way and some 75 times the number of galaxies in the known universe.

The rate of growth has also been extraordinary. More transistors were made in 2014 than in all the years prior to 2011. Even the recent great recession had little effect. Transistor production in 2009—a year of deep recession for the semiconductor industry—was more than the cumulative total prior to 2007.

Originally Posted by Darrin Qualman, 2017

[In 2017]]Global production of transistors has surpassed 20 trillion per second—hundreds of quintillions per year.

So it is not hard to imagine that perhaps every day we produce more
transistors than all the meals consumed by all the people who have lived
on Earth for all of history. Or perhaps more than the number of stitches
made in clothing or otherwise in all of history.

Whether the transistor was "the greatest invention of all time" is a totally
different question, but there is no doubt that more have been made and
sold than any other artifact in all of human history.