William Shockley

Shockley was born in London in 1910 to American parents and moved to Palo Alto at three. He was, by his own family's account, a difficult child, prone to tantrums serious enough that his parents kept him out of school and taught him at home for several years. He took a physics degree at Caltech in 1932 and a doctorate at MIT in 1936, writing his thesis on the electron structure of sodium chloride, and was recruited straight out of graduate school to Bell Telephone Laboratories by the research director Mervin Kelly. He arrived believing, correctly, that a solid-state replacement for the fragile vacuum tube was close, and spent the next decade trying to build it.

He led the Bell Labs team that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, and in December 1947 the group demonstrated a working point-contact transistor. Shockley, furious that the first patent excluded him, worked mostly alone over the following weeks and arrived at the more practical junction transistor, unveiled in 1951. All three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics, though Bardeen and Brattain barely spoke to him again. In 1956 Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View to be near his aging mother — the first company built around silicon rather than germanium, in what was still farmland and did not yet have a name for what it was becoming. His management drove out his own best people within a year.

Eight of those researchers, including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, quit in 1957 over his erratic management and lie-detector tests, founded Fairchild Semiconductor, and became the direct ancestors of Intel and the rest of Silicon Valley. Shockley's own company never recovered and was sold off by 1960. He spent his last three decades at Stanford turning that same certainty on race, arguing in speeches and Senate testimony that Black Americans were genetically less intelligent than white Americans and proposing to pay people with IQs under 100 a bounty for voluntary sterilization. The Pioneer Fund gave him roughly 2.5 million of today's dollars to pursue it. He ran for the Senate on the idea in 1982 and took 0.37 percent of the vote.

He died of prostate cancer in Stanford, California, on August 12, 1989, estranged from two of his three children, who learned of his death from the newspaper. His scientific standing survived him more or less intact — the transistor underlies essentially everything electronic built since — but institutions moved to separate his name from the rest of it. The University of Leeds withdrew an honorary degree offer over the sterilization proposals, and Yosemite climbers stripped his name from a route he first climbed in 1953, still known simply as The Ceiling. He had also donated sperm to a bank built to propagate the genes of Nobel laureates.

William Shockley's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Point-contact transistor invention
  Built with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs 1947
• Junction transistor invention
  Developed largely alone after being excluded from the first patent 1951
• Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors book
  The standard textbook of the field for a generation 1950
• Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory company
  The first silicon transistor company, and the seed of Silicon Valley 1956

• 1913 aged ~3 Family moves to Palo Alto, California
• 1932 aged ~22 Earns a physics degree at Caltech
• 1936 aged ~26 Completes a doctorate at MIT and joins Bell Labs
• December 1947 aged 37 The team demonstrates the first working transistor
• 1951 aged ~41 Unveils the more practical junction transistor Developed largely alone.
• 1956 aged ~46 Shares the Nobel Prize in Physics and founds Shockley Semiconductor
• 1957 aged ~47 Eight researchers quit to found Fairchild Semiconductor They became known as the Traitorous Eight.
• 1963 aged ~53 Joins the Stanford faculty
• August 12, 1989 aged 79 Dies of prostate cancer in Stanford, California

• John Bardeen 1908–1991
  Only person to win two Nobel Prizes in Physics, for the transistor and superconductivity theory. shared the Nobel Prize with him
• Robert Noyce 1927–1990
  Co-inventor of the integrated circuit and co-founder of Intel, earning him the title Mayor of Silicon Valley. quit to found Fairchild Semiconductor
• Gordon Moore 1929–2023
  Co-founder of Intel whose observation became Moore's Law, driving decades of semiconductor progress. quit to found Fairchild Semiconductor
• Linus Pauling 1901–1994
  Chemist and peace activist who won two unshared Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Peace. Caltech contemporary