THE FATHER OF SILICON VALLEY:

WILLIAM BRADFORD SHOCKLEY

William Shockley

Photo from: http://www.physik.uni-frankfurt.de/~jr/gif/phys/shockley.jpg

 

CHILDHOOD

            William Bradford Shockley was the son of William Hillman Shockley and May Shockley. William Shockley, Sr. was a mining engineer and was trained at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). May was one of the first females to graduate from Stanford University. She was also became the first woman deputy mineral surveyor in Nevada. They got married in 1908 and they moved to London, England on a business assignment. William Sr. was 24 years older than she was. He was in his mid-50’s and he was in her mid-20’s when they were married. 

            In 1910, they had their only child, William Bradford Shockley. His middle name was Bradford because that was his mother's maiden name. They returned to the U.S. and moved to Palo Alto, California. William Jr. was very spoiled and almost uncontrollable. He did not have many friends and was thought of by other kids as pathologic. His parents were very secretive and paranoid people. They were very nomadic; they moved frequently. William Jr. was home schooled until he was about eight years old. William Jr. thought it was better to be home schooled because he didn’t like to mingle with other children. William Sr. died in 1925 when William Jr. was 15 years old. After his death, he and his mother permanently moved to Hollywood.

            William Shockley was considered a true American. He can trace his ancestry to the Mayflower on his father’s side. This was one of the reasons that he was very arrogant of his race. This arrogance leads to a controversy that consumes his later years.  

           

EDUCATION 

            Shockley went to Palo Alto Military Academy and Hollywood High School. He became acquainted with his neighbor, who taught physics at Stanford University. This sparked his interest in physics. He went to University of California at Los Angeles for one year and then transferred to California Institute of Technology. He majored in physics and got a bachelor’s degree in 1932. He went to MIT for his Ph. D. His thesis for his doctorate was “Calculations of Wave Functions for Electrons in Sodium Chloride Crystals”. He received his Ph. D. in 1936 and entered Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey right after graduation. He was a brilliant student and was lucky to get a job offer at what was the nation’s best research laboratory at the time.  

 

MARRIAGE

            Shockley married Jean Alberta Bailey during the summer of his first year at California Institute of Technology. They had their first of three children that very winter. Their children’s names were Alison, William, and Richard. He wasn’t a very good father. He was not affectionate and sometimes very cruel. He became very distant with his children, later not meeting them for many years at a time. Shockley and his wife got divorced in 1955, while Jean was recovering from uterine cancer. He took care of Jean when she got ill and was in charge of her healthcare. Their marriage had been disintegrating for a long time and he finally divorced her when he realized she would be okay. He had been having an affair with Emmy Lanning.  He got married to Emmy Lanning the next year, with whom he stayed married to until his death.

 

WORLD WAR II

            Right before the outbreak of World War II, Shockley and his friend, James Fisk, designed the nuclear reactor. The government kept the design top secret. They did not allow Shockley or Fisk to take out any patents on it, nor did they tell the scientists who were working on the Manhattan Project.

            Shockley joined the Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Group. He improved attacks on German U-Boats by changing the way the Navy searched for the boats. He also improved attacks on German bombers by discovering the bombers didn’t utilize radar.

            Shockley joined the Army Air Corps, where he trained bombers. He was very distinguished and won the National Medal of Merit. Even though he was being recognized for his achievements, he was very depressed and tried to commit suicide during this time.

 

TRANSISTOR

            The transistor was created to replace vacuum tubes, which were very unreliable and delicate. Vacuum tubes were “used as valves to control the flow of electrons…”1. Shockley and his team, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen, worked together to make something to replace the fickle vacuum tube. Shockley came up with the basic idea of the transistor, but was not able to build it. In December 1947, Brattain and Bardeen produced the first point-contact transistor. It was named for transfer resistance. Shockley was very mad that he wasn’t present during the momentous occasion. Brattain and Bardeen were not fond of Shockley because of his aggressive nature and competitiveness. They were not too happy that he became known as the sole inventor of the transistor.

            He decided to upstage their transistor and design a better one. He created the notion of a sandwich transistor. “He suggested using a thin layer of P-type semiconductor (in which the charge is carried by the holes) sandwiched between two layers of N-type semiconductor (where the charge is carried by electrons)”2. The sandwich transistor worked better than the point junction transistor.

 

Transistor

Photo from: http://www.robotroom.com/SPCBTransistorCloseUp.jpg

 

 

 

COMPANY

            Shockley left Bell Labs in 1954. He partnered up with Arnold Beckman and created the Shockley Transistor Corporation. He based his company near Stanford, thus bringing “silicone to the Silicone Valley”. Silicone was used in transistors because it was a pretty common substance. After Shockley made his company in that location, many other people made companies in the same location. The area became the center for computer research.

            Gordon Moore was an employee at Shockley’s company. He wrote an article describing how difficult it was to work with Shockley:

                        “Working for Shockley proved to be a particular challenge. He extended his competitive nature even to his

                            working relationships with the young physicists he supervised. Beyond that, he developed traits that we

                             came to view as paranoid. He suspected that members of his staff were purposely trying to undermine

                             the project and prohibited them from access to some of his work.  He viewed several trivial events

                            as malicious and assigned blame. He felt it necessary to check new results with his previous colleagues

                            at Bell Labs, and he generally made it difficult for us to work together…Shockley’s management style

                            proved an increasing burden…The group was in danger of breaking up…we became convinced that our

                             best course was to set up our own company…Unintentionally, Shockley contributed to one of the most

                             spectacular and successful industry expansions in history”. 3

            Gordon Moore later went on to become one of the founders of Intel. Shockley, on the other hand, never manufactured commercial transistors. Many people made millions of dollars from the computer industry, yet Shockley didn’t make too much from it even though he revolutionized this industry and he basically created Silicone Valley.

Gordon Moore

Photo From: http://www.viphostsystem.com/glossario/moore.jpg

 

 

 

 

INTELLIGENCE CONTRAVERSY

            Shockley began teaching science at Stanford University in 1963. He became interested in genetics and intelligence. After studying U.S. Army IQ tests, he proposed African-Americans are less intelligent than Caucasians. This created a huge outrage among educators in the field of genetics. He made matters worse by suggesting that people with lower IQ’s be sterilized. He donated to a sperm bank that only had “sperm of geniuses”. He was written about in newspapers and magazines. No one supported his ideas. He became a discredited and disgraced individual. He was isolated from everyone except his wife. He died in 1989 from prostate cancer. He decided that his work in genetics much more important than anything else he had done. Because of this controversy, he is looked at as a quack and is not respected by most people. Most textbooks ostracize him as a maniac racist.  

 

AWARDS

            Shockley won the U.S. Medal of Merit in 1946 for his service to the U.S. Army. The Morris E. Liebmann Award of the Institute of Radio Engineers was awarded to him in 1951. He won the Oliver E. Buckley Solid State Physics Prize in 1953. The following year, he won the Cyrus B. Comstock Prize of the National Academy of Sciences. His biggest achievement was the Nobel Prize in Physics, which was awarded to him in 1956. He won the Holley Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1963. In 1972, he was awarded the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Gold Medal and also was inducted in the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame. He was named the Emeritus Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in 1975. Finally, he was awarded a Medal of Honor in 1980 from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics.

 

 

References:

1. Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martine Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray

2. http://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/shockley

3. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1956/shockley-bio.html

4. http://www.bookrags.com/?p=bio&u=william-shockley-wes

5. http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/shockley.html

 

Footnotes:

1. http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/shockley02.html

2. http://www.bookrags.com/?p=bio&u=william-shockley-wes

3. http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/shockley03.html

 

Sunia Choudhury

Stony Brook University

CSE 301- History of Computing

Spring 2007