William Shockley

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William Shockley

William Bradford Shockley (1910-1989)
Born	13 February 1910 London, England
Died	12 August 1989 Stanford, California
Institution	Bell Labs Shockley Semiconductor Stanford
Alma mater	Caltech MIT
Academic advisor	John C. Slater
Known for	Coinventor of the transistor
Notable prizes	Nobel Prize in Physics (1956)

William Bradford Shockley (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was a British-born American physicist and inventor.

Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s led to California's "Silicon Valley" becoming a hotbed of electronics innovation.

In his later life, Shockley was a professor at Stanford, and he also became a staunch advocate of eugenics.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early years 1.2 Shockley Semiconductor 1.3 Later years 1.4 Beliefs about populations and genetics 1.4.1 Media reactions 2 Honors 3 Patents 4 Books by Shockley 5 Books about Shockley 6 See also 7 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early years

Shockley was 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. While still a student, Shockley married Iowan Jean Bailey in August of 1933. In March of 1934 he and Jean had a baby girl, Alison. Shockley was awarded his doctorate from MIT in 1936. Notably, the title of his doctoral thesis was Calculation of Electron Wave Functions in Sodium Chloride Crystals, and was suggested by his thesis advisor, John C. Slater. After receiving his doctorate, he joined a research group headed by Dr. C.J. Davisson at Bell Labs in New Jersey. In 1938 got his first patent, "Electron Discharge Device" on electron multipliers.

When World War II broke out, Shockley became involved in radar research at the labs in Whippany, New Jersey. In May 1942 he took leave from Bell Labs to become a research director at Columbia University's Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Group. This involved devising methods for countering the tactics of submarines with improved convoying techniques, optimizing depth charge patterns, and so on. This project required frequent trips to the Pentagon and Washington, where Shockley met many high ranking officers and government officials. In 1944 he organized a training program for B-29 bomber pilots to use new radar bomb sights. In late 1944 he took a three month tour to bases around the world to assess the results. For this project, Secretary of War Robert Patterson awarded Shockley the Medal of Merit on October 17, 1946.

[edit] Shockley Semiconductor

Eventually he was given a chance to run his own company, as a division of a Caltech friend's successful electronics firm. In 1955, Shockley 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 join him. Instead, Shockley 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 the result of a malicious act 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 separated from his wife Jean in the Spring of 1954, finally divorcing her in the Summer of 1954. Shortly after forming the company, on November 23, 1955, Shockley married Emmy Lanning, a teacher of psychiatric nursing from upstate New York. They had a very happy marriage that lasted until his death in 1989.

Shockley was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956, along with Bardeen and Brattain. In his Nobel lecture, he gave full credit to Brattain and Bardeen as the inventors of the point-contact transistor. The three of them, together with wives and guests, had a rather raucous late-night champagne-fuelled party to celebrate together.

In late 1957, eight of Shockley's researchers, who called themselves "the Traitorous Eight," resigned after Shockley decided not to continue research into silicon-based semiconductors. [1] Several of the eight met with Sherman Fairchild and described the situation, and the eight started Fairchild Semiconductor after being given seed capital from 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.

While Shockley was still trying to get his three-state device to work, Fairchild and Texas Instruments both introduced the first integrated circuits, making Shockley's work in that area essentially superfluous.

[edit] Later years

In July of 1961 Shockley, his wife Emmy, and son Dick were involved in a serious automobile accident: Shockley took several months to recover from his injuries. His firm was sold to Clevite, but never made a profit. When Shockley was eased out of the directorship, he joined Stanford University, where he was appointed the Alexander M. Poniatoff Professor of Engineering and Applied Science.

Shockley's last patent was granted in 1968, for a rather complex semiconductor device.

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]

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.

[edit] Beliefs about populations and genetics

Late in his life, Shockley became intensely interested in questions of race, breeding and 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 believed that the higher rate of reproduction among people of color was having what he called a "dysgenic" effect due to their lower IQs. Shockley's published writings and lectures to scientific organization on this topic, such as the National Academy of Sciences, were partly based on the research of Arthur Jensen, Cyril Burt and H. J. Eysenck. 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.

The eminent Berkeley psychologist, Arthur Jensen recalled that^[2]

One night at a dinner party at which I was present with Shockley and several others, someone said to Shockley: "Bill I just can't figure you out. On some Issues, such as your advocacy of liberalized abortion laws you seem to be on the Left and take an extreme liberal position, and on other issues, such as your interest in eugenics and belief in the importance of heredity in human quality, you seem to take a Rightist or very Conservative position." Schockley looked a bit annoyed by this observation and replied rather impatiently: "My position on various issues may seem inconsistent to you, but it's because I simply don't operate on the lowly X-axis of Left-Right or Liberal-Conservative. I operate entirely on the upright Y-axis." "And what is that?" his questioner asked. Shockley replied: "The application of scientific ingenuity to the solution of human problems."

[edit] Media reactions

Shockley was frequently attacked in the media for his work on eugenics, for it had become a taboo subject for the public, largely because of its manifestations under the National Socialists in WWII.

For example, in the August, 2006 issue of Discover, Susan Kruglinski wrote:

"in the view of many, [Shockley] went off the deep end. His fascination with largely outdated genetics research (epitomized by his famed association with a Nobel laureate sperm bank) transformed his elitist worldview into full-blown racism. In the last years of his life he was utterly isolated from his former colleagues, left to harangue strangers on the inadequacy of the Negro race."

PBS reported:[3]

"[Shockley] began giving speeches on population problems, an issue that had interested him since his wartime trips to India. In May of 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. He had slipped into eugenics. In an interview a year later with U.S. News & World Report he fell into the trap of discussing race. He pointed out that African Americans as a group scored 15 points lower on IQ tests, and suggested the cause was hereditary."

In his later years Shockley took several precautions to improve his interactions with the media, to little avail. He taped his telephone conversations with reporters, and then sent the transcript to the reporter by registered mail. At one point he toyed with the idea of making them take a simple quiz on his work before discussing the subject with them.^[3] In an egregious case of media misrepresentation, he filed suit against the Atlanta Constitution in July of 1981, and won. ^[4]

[edit] Honors

• Shockley was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
• He received honorary science doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University in New Jersey and Gustavus Adolphus Colleges in Minnesota.
• Oliver E. Buckley Solid State Physics Prize of the American Physical Society.
• Maurice Liebman Memorial Prize from the Institute of Radio Engineers.
• Holley Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1963.

[edit] Patents

Shockley was granted over ninety US patents. Some notable ones are:

• U.S. Patent 2502488  "Semiconductor Amplifier". Applied for on Sept. 24, 1948; His first involving transistors .
• U.S. Patent 2655609  "Bistable Circuits". Applied for on July 22 1952; Used in computers.
• U.S. Patent 2787564  "Forming Semiconductive Devices by Ionic Bombardment". Applied for on Oct. 28, 1954; The diffusion process for implantation of impurities.
• U.S. Patent 3031275  "Process for Growing Single Crystals". Applied for on Feb. 20, 1959; Improvements on process for production of basic materials.
• U.S. Patent 3053635  "Method of Growing Silicon Carbide Crystals". Applied for on Sept. 26, 1960; Exploring other semiconductors.

[edit] Books by Shockley

• Shockley, William Electrons and holes in semiconductors, with applications to transistor electronics, Krieger (1956) ISBN 0-88275-382-7.
• Shockley, William Mechanics Merrill (1966).
• Shockley, William and Pearson, Roger Shockley on Eugenics and Race: The Application of Science to the Solution of Human Problems Scott-Townsend (1992) ISBN 1-878465-03-1.

[edit] Books about Shockley

• 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.

[edit] See also

• Julius Edgar Lilienfeld

[edit] External links

• National Academy of Sciences biography
• Nobel biography
• PBS biography
• Time Magazine 100 Biography of William Shockley
• Interview with Shockley biographer Joel Shurkin
• Nobel Lecture
• History of the transistor
• Shockley and Bardeen-Brattain patent disputes
• Series of Slate.com Articles on the controversial sperm bank
• The genius factory
• William Shockley vs. Francis Cress-Welsing ( Tony Brown Show, 1974)
• A Shockley website (shockleytransistor.com) has been established, using the company name, to honor Shockley and those who first processed silicon in Silicon Valley.

Persondata
NAME	Shockley, William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Physicist, inventor
DATE OF BIRTH	13 February 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH	London, England
DATE OF DEATH	12 August 1989
PLACE OF DEATH	Stanford, California