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. [1]
Biography
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 PhD 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.
Solid-state transistor
Shortly after the end of the war in 1945, Bell Labs formed a Solid State Physics Group, led by Shockley and chemist Stanley
Morgan; other personnel including Bardeen and Brattain, physicist Gerald Pearson, chemist
Robert Gibney, electronics expert Hilbert Moore and several technicians. Their assignment was to seek a solid-state alternative
to fragile glass vacuum tube amplifiers. Their first attempts were based on Shockley's ideas
about using an external electrical field on a semiconductor to affect its conductivity. These experiments mysteriously failed
every time in all sorts of configurations and materials. The group was at a standstill until Bardeen suggested a theory that
invoked surface states that prevented the field from penetrating the semiconductor. The group changed its focus to study these
surface states and they met almost daily to discuss the work. The rapport of the group was excellent, and ideas were freely
exchanged.[2] By the winter of 1946 they had enough results
that Bardeen submitted a paper on the surface states to Physical Review. Brattain
started experiments to study the surface states through observations made while shining a bright light on the semiconductor's
surface. This led to several more papers (one of them co-authored with Shockley), which estimated the density of the surface
states to be more than enough to account for their failed experiments. The pace of the work picked up significantly when they
started to surround point contacts between the semiconductor and the conducting wires with electrolytes. Moore built a circuit that allowed them to vary the frequency of the input signal easily and
suggested that they use glycol borate (gu), a viscous chemical that didn't evaporate. Finally
they began to get some evidence of power amplification when Pearson, acting on a suggestion by Shockley, [3] put a voltage on a droplet of gu placed across a P-N junction.
December of 1947 was Bell Labs' "Miracle Month," when Bardeen and Brattain -- working
without Shockley -- succeeded in creating a point-contact transistor that
achieved amplification. By the next month, Bell Lab's patent attorneys started to work on the
patent applications.
Bell Labs attorneys soon discovered that Shockley's field effect principle had been anticipated and patented in 1930 by
Julius Lilienfeld.[4] Although the patent appeared "breakable" (it could not work) the patent attorneys based one of its
four patent applications only on the Bardeen-Brattain point contact design. Three others submitted at the same time covered the
electrolyte-based transistors with Bardeen, Gibney and Brattain as the inventors. Shockley's name was not on any of these patent
applications. This angered Shockley, who thought his name should also be on the patents because the work was based on his field
effect idea. He even made efforts to have the patent written only in his name, and told Bardeen and Brattain of his
intentions.
At the same time he secretly continued his own work to build a different sort of transistor based on junctions instead of
point contacts; he expected this kind of design would be more likely to be viable commercially. Shockley worked furiously on his
magnum opus, Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors which was finally published as a 558 page treatise in 1950. In it,
Shockley worked out the critical ideas of drift and diffusion and the differential equations that govern the flow of electrons in
solid state crystals. Shockley's diode equation is also described. This seminal work became the
"bible" for an entire generation of scientists working to develop and improve new variants of the transistor and other devices
based on semiconductors.
Shockley was dissatisfied with certain parts of the explanation for how the point contact transistor worked and conceived of
the possibility of minority carrier injection. This led Shockley to ideas for what he called a "sandwich transistor." This
resulted in the junction transistor, which was announced at a press
conference on July 4, 1951. Shockley obtained a patent for this invention on September 25, 1951. Different fabrication methods
for this device were developed but the "diffused-base" method became the method of choice for many applications. It soon eclipsed
the point contact transistor, and it and its offspring became overwhelmingly dominant in the marketplace for many years. Shockley
continued as a group head to lead much of the effort at Bell Labs to improve it and its fabrication for two more years.
In 1951, he was elected a member of the National Academy of
Sciences (NAS). He was forty-one years old; this was rather young for such an election. Two years later, he was chosen as
the recipient of the prestigious Comstock Prize for Physics by the NAS, and was the recipient of
many other awards and honors.
The ensuing publicity generated by the "invention of the transistor" often thrust Shockley to the fore, much to the chagrin of
Bardeen and Brattain. Bell Labs management, however, consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Shockley eventually
infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor.
Bardeen began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951. Brattain refused to work with Shockley further
and was assigned to another group. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain had much to do with the development of the transistor beyond the
first year after its invention.[5]
Shockley's abrasive management style caused him to be passed over for executive promotion at Bell Labs, which also felt he was
a greater asset as a research scientist and theorist. Shockley wanted the power and profit he felt he deserved. He took a leave
from Bell Labs in 1953 and moved back to the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) for four months as a visiting professor.
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.[6] 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-fueled 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.
Sidelights
Shockley was a popular speaker/lecturer, an amateur magician and, famously, once magically produced a bouquet of roses at the
end of an address before the American Physical Society. He was famed in his
early years for his elaborate practical jokes.[7] He became
an accomplished rock climber, going often to the Shawangunks in the Hudson River Valley, where he pioneered a route across an overhang, known to this day as "Shockley's
Ceiling."[8]
He was an atheist, and never attended church.[9]
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.
Beliefs about populations and genetics
Late in his life, Shockley became intensely interested in questions of race, intelligence 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 he risked severely tarnishing his reputation. When asked why he seemed to
take positions associated with both the political right and left, Shockley explained that his goal was "the application of
scientific ingenuity to the solution of human problems."[10]
Shockley believed that the higher rate of reproduction among the less intelligent was having what he called a
"dysgenic" effect, causing a lowering of worldwide human quality. Although Shockley was
concerned about both Black and White dysgenic effects, he found the situation among Blacks more disastrous. While unskilled
Whites had 3.7 children on average versus an average of 2.3 children for skilled Whites, Shockley found from the 1970 Census
Bureau reports that unskilled Blacks had 5.4 children versus 1.9 for the skilled Blacks.[11] Shockley reasoned that because intelligence (like most traits) is at least
partially inherited, the Black population would, over time become much less intelligent countering all the gains that had been
made by the Civil Rights movement. The Left made much of his concern about Black intelligence so as to brand him a racist because
(as he stated) this stance countered their claim that all people are identical. Shockley's published writings and lectures to
scientific organizations on this topic, such as the National Academy of Sciences, were partly based on the research of Berkeley
psychologist Arthur Jensen, Cyril Burt and
H. J. Eysenck. Shockley also proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to
undergo voluntary sterilization.
He donated sperm to the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank
founded by Robert Klark Graham in hopes of spreading humanity's 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 publicly acknowledge his donation to the sperm bank. However, Shockley's views about the genetic superiority of
whites over blacks brought the Repository for Germinal Choice notable negative publicity and discouraged other Nobel Prize
winners from donating sperm.[12]
In 1981 he filed a libel suit against the Atlanta Constitution after a reporter called him a "Hitlerite" and compared
his racial views to the Nazis. Shockley won the suit, but received only $1 in damages. He was
represented by Murray M. Silver, Esq., of Atlanta, Ga.[13]
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.[14]
Death
He died in 1989 of prostate cancer. [1]
Shockley had a stormy relationship with his three children. By the time of his death he was almost completely estranged from
them, and his children are reported to have learned of his death only through the print media.
In 2002, 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."[15]
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.
Patents
Shockley was granted over ninety US patents. Some notable ones are:
- U.S. Patent
"Semiconductor Amplifier". Applied for on Sept. 24, 1948; His first involving transistors .
- U.S. Patent
"Bistable Circuits". Applied for on July 22 1952; Used in computers.
- U.S. Patent
"Forming Semiconductive Devices by Ionic Bombardment". Applied for on Oct. 28, 1954; The
diffusion process for implantation of impurities.
- U.S. Patent
"Process for Growing Single Crystals". Applied for on Feb. 20, 1959; Improvements on process for
production of basic materials.
- U.S. Patent
"Method of Growing Silicon Carbide Crystals". Applied for on Sept. 26, 1960; Exploring other
semiconductors.
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.
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.
See also
References
- ^ a b
- ^ Brattain quoted in Crystal Fire p. 127
- ^ Crystal Fire p. 132
- ^ http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/~eugeniik/history/lilienfeld.htm
- ^ Crystal Fire p. 278
- ^ Crystal Fire p. 247
- ^ Crystal Fire p. 45
- ^ Crystal Fire p. 132
- ^ Crystal Fire p. 133
- ^ "Shockley on Eugenics and Race" p. 48
- ^ Shockley on Eugenics and Race p. 278
- ^ http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/03/books/review/03MORRICE.html?ei=5088&en=859598b50aab62e1&ex=1278043200&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=all#
- ^ Kessler, Ronald. "Absent at the Creation; How
one scientist made off with the biggest invention since the light bulb", Washington
Post Magazine, April 6, 1997. Retrieved on 2007-07-21. “At office parties William
Shockley would perform magic tricks, pulling red balls, coins or flowers out of people's noses or ears. He would announce that he
knew how to stop inflation, then take out a cigarette lighter and set fire to $ 1 bills. In front of his wife, he would endorse
prostitution as a solution to marital boredom. If Shockley had his quirks, he was also brilliant: He worked at Bell Telephone
Laboratories, probably the world's preeminent industrial research lab. He was a physicist himself, and he supervised other
physicists. He would, in time, receive the Nobel Prize. When the 50th anniversary of the transistor is celebrated this December,
his name will surely be invoked as the father of that invention.”
- ^ "Shockley on Genetics and Race" p. 33
- ^ http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/02/shockley1023.html
External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
| Awards |
Preceded by
Richard Bellman |
IEEE Medal of
Honor
1980 |
Succeeded by
Sidney Darlington |
Preceded by
Dwight Eisenhower |
Time's Men of the
Year(Alongside Linus Pauling, Isidor
Rabi, Edward Teller, Joshua Lederberg,
Donald A. Glaser, Willard Libby,
Robert Woodward, Charles Draper,
Emilio Segrè, John Enders,
Charles Townes, George Beadle,
James Van Allen and Edward Purcell
representing U.S. Scientists)
1960 |
Succeeded by
John F. Kennedy |
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