William Shockley
William Bradford Shockley (
February 13,
1910 –
August 12,
1989) was a British-born
American physicist and
inventor of the
transistor with co-inventors
John Bardeen and
Walter Houser Brattain, for which all three were awarded the 1956
Nobel Prize in physics. His attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 60s led directly to the creation of
Silicon Valley. In his later life Shockley was a professor at
Stanford, and he also became a foremost advocate of
eugenics.
Shockley was named by
Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Born in
London to
American parents, and raised in
California, he received his Bachelor of Science degree from the
California Institute of Technology in
1932 and his doctorate from
MIT in
1936. Notably, the title of his doctoral thesis was
Calculation of Electron Wave Functions in Sodium Chloride Crystals. After receiving his doctorate, he immediately joined a research group headed by Dr. C.J. Davisson at
Bell Labs in
New Jersey, and began moving up the management ladder.
Solid-state transistor
In the mid 1940s, Shockley's group, consisting of Bardeen and Brattain, sought a solid-state alternative to fragile glass vacuum tube amplifiers. Shockley insisted on working alone, leaving his two researchers by themselves, occasionally dropping by to direct their work. December of
1947 was
Bell Labs' "
Miracle Month", when Bardeen and Brattain succeeded in creating a
point-contact transistor – without Shockley. Even so, Shockley thought he should have the patent, since the team's work was motivated by Shockley's idea using field effects. He made efforts to have the patent written in his name only and told Bardeen and Brattain of his intentions. At the same time he secretly continued his own work to build a different sort of transistor based on junctions instead of point contacts; he expected this kind of design would be more likely to be viable commercially.
Bell Lab attorneys soon discovered that Shockley's field effect principle had been anticipated and patented in 1930 by
Julius Lilienfeld. Although the patent appeared breakable, Bell Labs decided it could not risk the chance of its patent being rejected, and therefore based its patent application only on the Bardeen-Brattain design. Shockley's name was not on the resulting patent.
Shockley's diode equation is from this period.
[William Shockley (1950), Electrons and holes in semiconductors, with applications to transistor electronics ] During this time Shockley worked out the critical ideas of drift and diffusion and the differential equations that govern the flow of electrons in solid state crystals. He also conceived of the possibility of minority carrier injection that led to his concepts for a
sandwich transistor weeks later. This would lead to the , invented by Shockley on
July 5,
1951. He obtained a patent for this invention.
The ensuing publicity generated by the "invention of the transistor" limelighted Shockley. Shockley was a popular speaker/lecturer and was often consulted by Washington (DC) and the military. This further infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain. Shockley later blocked the two from working on the junction transistor. Bardeen eventually quit, while Brattain refused to work with Shockley further.
His abrasive management style caused him to be passed over for executive promotion at Bell Labs, which felt he was a greater asset as a research scientist and theorist. Shockley wanted the power and profit he felt he deserved. He resigned from Bell Labs in
1953 and moved back to the California Institute of Technology.
Shockley Semiconductor
Eventually he was given a chance to run his own company as a division of his Caltech friend's successful electronics firm. In
1955, he joined
Beckman Instruments, where he was appointed as the Director of Beckman's newly founded
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division in
Mountain View, California. With his prestige and Beckman's capital, Shockley attempted to lure some of his former colleagues from Bell Labs to his new lab, but none of them would come to join him. Instead he started scouring universities for the brightest graduates to build a company from scratch, one that would be run "his way".
"His way" could generally be summed up as "domineering and increasingly paranoid". In one famous incident he claimed that a secretary's cut thumb was an attempt to poison him, and he demanded
lie detector tests to find the culprit.[
1] It was later demonstrated the cut was due to a broken thumbtack on the office door, and from that point the research staff was increasingly hostile. Meanwhile his demands to create a new and technically difficult device, now known as the
Shockley diode, meant that the project was moving very slowly.
Shockley was a co-recipient of the
Nobel Prize in physics in
1956, along with Bardeen and Brattain. A group of about 30 colleagues have met on and off at Stanford since 1956 to reminisce about their time with Shockley and his central role in sparking the information technology revolution, its organizer saying "Shockley is the man who brought silicon to Silicon Valley." [
2]
In late
1957 eight of his researchers, whom he later named "the
Traitorous Eight", resigned after Shockley decided not to continue research into silicon-based semiconductors[
3]. The eight started
Fairchild Semiconductor after being given
seed capital from
Fairchild to form a semiconductor division. Among the "Traitorous Eight" were
Robert Noyce and
Gordon E. Moore, who themselves would leave Fairchild to create
Intel. Other offspring companies of Fairchild Semiconductor include
National Semiconductor and
Advanced Micro Devices. Shockley Semiconductor did not, however, make Shockley a fortune or even turn a profit. While still trying to get his three-state device to work, Fairchild and
Texas Instruments both introduced the first
integrated circuits, making Shockley's work essentially superfluous.
Shockley had a stormy relationship with his three children. By the time of his death in
1989 of
prostate cancer, he was almost completely estranged from them, and his children are reported to have learned of his death only through the print media.
Beliefs about populations and genetics
In his later life, Shockley began giving speeches on population problems, an issue that had interested him since his wartime trips to India. In 1963 he gave a speech at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota suggesting that the people least competent to survive in the world were the ones reproducing the fastest, while the best of the human population was using birth control and having fewer children.
In an interview with
U.S. News & World Report in 1963, he "fell into the trap of discussing race," as one biographer writes.[
4] He noted that intelligence research showed a genetic factor in intelligence and that tests for
IQ indicate that
African Americans have an average IQ 15 points lower than the population average. He was subsequently attacked in the media, for eugenics had become unpopular after its manifestations under the Nazis in WWII.
(See also IQ:Genetics vs environment and Race and intelligence)Shockley believed that the higher rate of reproduction among African Americans was having a "
dysgenic" effect, and expressed an interest in
eugenics. He thought this work was important to the genetic future of the population, and came to describe it as the most important work of his career, even though it severely tarnished his reputation. Shockley's published writings on this topic, such as in Letters to the Editor of the
Palo Alto Times, were largely based on the research of
Cyril Burt. Shockley also proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization.
Perhaps it was his beliefs about eugenics that led him to donate sperm to the
Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank founded by
Robert Klark Graham in hopes of spreading humans' best genes. The bank, called by the media the "Nobel Prize sperm bank," claimed to have three Nobel Prize-winning donors, though Shockley was the only one to come forward publicly. No children were conceived with any of the Nobel Prize sperm. Although some of Shockley's notoriety rubbed off on the sperm bank, at the same time the publicity created a demand for the material. This, together with the zero success rate of the original donors, caused Graham to broaden his criteria to allow for a wider range of donors (younger, taller, and better-looking than what he referred to as the "bald little professor" stereotype of his previous donors). A total of 215 babies were born until the bank's closure. [
5]
* Shockley,
"Semiconductor amplifier". April 4, 1950.
* Joel N. Shurkin;
Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2006. ISBN 1-4039-8815-3
* Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson;
Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age. New York: Norton. 1997. ISBN 0-393-31851-6 pbk.
*
National Academy of Sciences biography* http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1956/shockley-bio.html (Nobel biography)
* http://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/shockley (for a good biography)
* http://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/events/miraclemo.html (history of the transistor)
*
About William Shockley*
Shockley and Bardeen-Brattain patent disputes*
Series of Slate.com articles on the controversial sperm bank* "Darwin's Engineer", by David Plotz,
Los Angeles Times Magazine,
June 5,
2005 (A biography of
Robert Klark Graham, with details of Shockley's involvement in the Repository for Germinal Choice)
*
their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect. * http://www.thegeniusfactory.net/
*
Interview with Shockley biographer Joel Shurkin*
Time Magazine 100 Biography of William Shockley
