William Shockley
1910 – 1989 American physicist, semiconductor entrepreneur
Co-inventor of the transistor who brought the semiconductor industry to California, later notorious for promoting discredited racial theories of intelligence.
- Affiliations
- Bell Labs, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, Stanford University
William Shockley led the Bell Labs group that produced the first transistor in 1947 and shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. He then founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory near Palo Alto, seeding what became Silicon Valley, but his abrasive management drove away the young researchers later called the traitorous eight, who founded Fairchild Semiconductor. In his later years as a Stanford professor he became a prominent advocate of eugenics, arguing that Black Americans were genetically less intelligent and proposing payments for voluntary sterilization, views widely rejected by scientists as pseudoscience and racism. That advocacy overshadowed his standing at the end of his life.
Connections
- associate of Gordon Moore — Recruited Moore to his lab, then lost him among the traitorous eight.
- associate of Gordon Moore — Worked at Shockley Semiconductor before leaving as one of the traitorous eight.
In the timeline
- 1947 The transistor co-inventor at Bell Labs
- 1948 Shockley conceives the junction transistor mentioned
- 1956 Shockley brings the transistor to the West Coast founder of Shockley Semiconductor
- 1957 The traitorous eight found Fairchild Semiconductor the boss the eight walked out on