William Shockley

William Bradford Shockley (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was a physicist and co-inventor of the transistor with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. In his later life, Shockley was a popular professor at Stanford.[1] (http://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/shockley/shockley3.html)

Born in London, England, 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. In the mid 1940's, 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, and he would occasionally drop 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 worked to come up with a new improved design 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. Bell Labs decided it could not risk the chance of its patent being rejected, due to Lilienfeld's patent, and therefore based its patent application on the Bardeen-Brattain design, which was new. Shockley's name was not on the resulting patent.

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 junction transistor, 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. This further infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain. Shockley later blocked the two from working on the junction transistor.

He was a popular speaker/lecturer and often consulted by Washington (DC) and the military. His abrasive management style caused him to be passed over for executive promotion at Bell Labs which correctly 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. 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, Inc., where he was appointed as the Director of Beckman's newly founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division in Mountain View, California.

Shockley was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956. With his prestige and Beckman's capital, Shockley personally recruited many of the top scientists and graduates in the emerging field he had help to create. However, Shockley's focus on pushing the forefront of research on solid state electronics and his domineering personality later made the Shockley Lab the training grounds for, later disgruntled, engineers & scientists to gather, learn and spin-off what would be become the giants of Silicon Valley. Shockley Semiconductor did not, however, make Shockley a fortune or even turn a profit. In late 1957, eight of his researchers, whom he named the Traitorous Eight, resigned and joined Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation 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.

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] (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/02/shockley1023.html)

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,[3] (http://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/shockley/shockley3.html) and he pointed out that African Americans as a group score 15 points lower on IQ tests, suggesting the cause was hereditary, as some researchers thought. He was subsequently attacked in the media by biologists and geneticists, for eugenics had become unpopular after its manifestations in WWII, and they tied his comments to Nazi eugenics practices.

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 genetics 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.

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 foward publicly. No children were conceived with any of the Nobel Prize sperm, however, the publicity that came with Shockley's announcement created a demand for the material. This caused Graham to broaden his criteria to allow distinguished and healthy looking men to donate, and 215 babies were born as a result.[4] (http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-spermbank23jun05,1,1795083.story)

Shockley had a stormy relationship with his three children, once being quoted as saying, "My children represent a definite regression." Shockley may have been referring to a the statistical effect called the regression toward the mean. 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 only learned of his death through the print media.

External references

• National Academy of Sciences biography (http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/wshockley.html)
• 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/science/info/junctw.html (history of the transistor)
• About William Shockley (http://www.nobel-winners.com/Physics/william_bradford_shockley.html)
• Shockley and Bardeen-Brattain patent disputes (http://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/events/patbat.html)
• "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)de:William B. Shockley

es:William Bradford Shockley nl:William Shockley ja:ウィリアム・ショックレー pl:William Shockley