William Shockley

William Shockley was born on 13 February 1910 in London, England, to American parents, raised in Palo Alto, California, and died on 12 August 1989 in Stanford, California. He earned a bachelor's degree from Caltech in 1932 and a PhD in physics from MIT in 1936, then joined Bell Labs, where by the mid-1940s he led the solid-state physics group whose research direction produced the transistor: John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated the first working point-contact transistor on 16 December 1947, Shockley not present for that specific demonstration, then Shockley himself developed the more easily manufactured junction transistor in 1951. He shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with Bardeen and Brattain for the transistor's invention. He left Bell Labs in 1955 to found Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory near Palo Alto, whose staff, several of whom left in 1957 over his management, went on to found Fairchild Semiconductor and later Intel, work credited with making the area now called Silicon Valley a centre of the industry Shockley's own transistor founded. From the 1960s, then a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, Shockley turned to public advocacy of eugenics, arguing without training in genetics or psychology that intelligence differences between races were substantially hereditary and proposing paid sterilization for people he judged low in intelligence. His theories were universally rejected by biologists and geneticists as racist pseudoscience and he published none of them as peer-reviewed science; the advocacy consumed much of the rest of his career and is the reason his later reputation differs sharply from his co-inventors' own.