William Shockley

William Shockley led the group that invented the transistor, founded the company that seeded Silicon Valley, and destroyed his own reputation with racial theories. Born in London in 1910 to American parents and raised in Palo Alto, he took degrees at Caltech and a doctorate at MIT, and joined Bell Labs in 1936. He worked on radar and anti-submarine operations research during the war, and afterwards led the solid-state physics group with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, pursuing a semiconductor amplifier to replace the vacuum tube. He was not present when Bardeen and Brattain demonstrated the point-contact transistor in December 1947, having pushed a field-effect approach that failed. Reportedly furious at being sidelined, he worked intensively over the following weeks and conceived the junction transistor — a more robust and manufacturable device, and the one that mattered commercially. He also had the lab's patent attorneys exclude his colleagues from parts of the filing. All three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize, but the group had broken up. He founded Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View in 1956 and recruited outstanding young scientists, then managed them so badly — posting salaries publicly, requiring lie detector tests — that eight left in 1957. The traitorous eight, including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, founded Fairchild Semiconductor and later Intel. Essentially every semiconductor firm in the valley descends from that walkout, so his failure as a manager built the industry. From the 1960s, as a Stanford professor, he argued that black Americans were genetically less intelligent and proposed paying people with low IQs to be sterilised. He donated to a sperm bank for Nobel laureates. He died in 1989, largely estranged from his family.

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