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William Shockley

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: William Bradford Shockley
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(born Feb. 13, 1910, London, Eng. — died Aug. 12, 1989, Palo Alto, Calif., U.S.) U.S. engineer and teacher. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He joined Bell Labs in 1936, where he began experiments that led to the development of the transistor. During World War II he was director of research for the U.S. Navy's Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group; later (1954 – 55) he was deputy director of the Defense Department's Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. He established the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory at Beckman Instruments in 1955. In 1956 he shared a Nobel Prize with John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain for their work at Bell Labs on the transistor. He taught at Stanford University (1958 – 74). From the late 1960s he earned notoriety for his outspoken and critical views on the intellectual capacity of blacks.

For more information on William Bradford Shockley, visit Britannica.com.

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Scientist: William Bradford Shockley
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British–American physicist (1910–1989)

Shockley, born the son of a mining engineer in London, was educated at the California Institute of Technology and at Harvard, where he obtained his PhD in 1936. He started work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1936. In 1963 he took up an appointment as professor of engineering at Stanford University.

Shockley is noted for his early work in the development of the transistor – an invention that has had a profound effect on modern society. He collaborated with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain in their work on the point-contact transistor (1947). The following year Shockley developed the junction transistor.

In semiconductors such as germanium and silicon the electrical conductivity is strongly affected by impurities. The germanium and silicon atoms have four outermost electrons and an impurity such as arsenic, with five outer electrons, contributes extra electrons to the solid. In such materials the current is carried by negative electrons and the conductivity is said to be n-type. Alternatively, impurities such as boron, with three outer electrons, have a different effect in that they introduce ‘holes’ – i.e., ‘missing’ electrons. An electron on an adjacent atom can move to ‘fill’ the hole, leaving another hole. By this mechanism electrical conduction is by movement of positive holes through the solid – the conductivity is said to be p-type.

Shockley experimented with junctions of p- and n-type material, showing how they act as rectifiers. He formed the first junction transistor of a thin layer of p-type material sandwiched between two n-type regions. This n–p–n junction transistor could be used to amplify current. Shockley shared the 1970 Nobel Prize for physics with Bardeen and Brattain.

Biography: William Shockley
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Physicist William Shockley (1910-1989) shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the transistor. He was also involved in the controversial topic of the genetic basis of intelligence.

William Shockley was a physicist whose work in the development of the transistor led to a Nobel Prize. By the late 1950s, his company, the Shockley Transistor Corporation, was part of a rapidly growing industry created as a direct result of his contributions to the field. Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, both of whom collaborated with him on developing the point contact transistor. Later, Shockley became involved in a controversial topic for which he had no special training, but in which he became avidly interested: the genetic basis of intelligence. During the 1960s, he argued, in a series of articles and speeches, that people of African descent have a genetically inferior mental capacity when compared to those with Caucasian ancestry. This hypothesis became the subject of intense and acrimonious debate.

William Bradford Shockley was born in London, England, on February 13, 1910, to William Hillman Shockley, an American mining engineer, and May (Bradford) Shockley, a mineral surveyor. The Shockleys, living in London on a business assignment when William was born, returned to California in 1913. Shockley did not enter elementary school at the usual age, however, because, as he told Men of Spaceauthor Shirley Thomas, "My parents had the idea that the general educational process was not as good as would be done at home." As a result, he was not enrolled in public schools until he had reached the age of eight.

Shockley's interest in physics developed early, inspired in part by a neighbor who taught the subject at Stanford and by his own parents' coaching and encouragement. By the time he had completed his secondary education at Palo Alto Military Academy and Hollywood High School at the age of seventeen, Shockley had made his commitment to a career in physics. Shockley and his parents agreed that he should spend a year at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) before attending the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he earned a bachelor's degree in physics in 1932. Offered a teaching fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Shockley taught while working on his doctoral dissertation, "Calculations of Wave Functions for Electrons in Sodium Chloride Crystals," for which he was awarded his Ph.D. in 1936. Shockley later told Thomas that this research in solid-state physics "led into my subsequent activities in the transistor field."

Upon graduation from MIT, Shockley accepted an offer to work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. An important factor in that decision was the opportunity it gave him to work with Clinton Davisson, who was to win the 1937 Nobel Prize in physics for proving Louis Victor de Broglie's theory that electrons assumed the characteristics of waves. Shockley's first assignment at Bell was the development of a new type of vacuum tube that would serve as an amplifier. But, almost as soon as he had arrived at Bell, he began to think of a radically new approach to the transmission of electrical signals using solid-state components rather than conventional vacuum tubes. At that time, vacuum tubes constituted the core of communication devices such as the radio because they have the ability to rectify (create a unidirectional current) and multiply electronic signals. They have a number of serious practical disadvantages, however, as they are relatively fragile and expensive, and have relatively short life-spans.

As early as the mid-1930s, Bell scientists had begun to think about alternatives to vacuum tubes in communication systems, and by 1939, Shockley was experimenting with semiconducting materials to achieve that transition. Semiconductors are materials such as silicon and germanium that conduct an electrical current much less efficiently than do conductors like silver and copper, but more effectively than do insulators like glass and most kinds of plastic. Shockley knew that one semiconductor, galena, had been used as a rectifier in early radio sets, and his experience in solid-state physics led him to believe that such materials might have even wider application in new kinds of communication devices.

The limited research Shockley was able to complete on this concept of alternative conductors was unsuccessful, largely because the materials available to him at the time were not pure enough. In 1940, war was imminent, and Shockley soon became involved in military research. His first job involved the development of radar equipment at a Bell field station in Whippany, New Jersey. In 1942, he became research director of the U.S. Navy's Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group at Columbia University, and served as a consultant to the Secretary of War from 1944 to 1945.

In 1945, Shockley returned to Bell Labs as director of its research program on solid-state physics. Together with John Bardeen, a theoretical physicist, and Walter Brattain, an experimental physicist, Shockley returned to his study of semiconductors as a means of amplification. After more than a year of failed trials, Bardeen suggested that the movement of electric current was being hampered by electrons trapped within a semiconductor's surface layer. That suggestion caused Shockley's team to suspend temporarily its efforts to build an amplification device and to concentrate instead on improving their understanding of the nature of semiconductors.

By 1947, Bardeen and Brattain had learned enough about semiconductors to make another attempt at building Shockley's device. This time they were successful. Their device consisted of a piece of germanium with two gold contacts on one side and a tungsten contact on the opposite side. When an electrical current was fed into one of the gold contacts, it appeared in a greatly amplified form on the other side. The device was given the name transistor (for trans fer re sistor ). More specifically, it was referred to as a point contact transistor because of the three metal contacts used in it.

The first announcement of the transistor appeared in a short article in the July 1, 1948 edition of the New YorkTimes. Few readers had the vaguest notion of the impact the fingernail-sized device would have on the world. A few months later, Shockley proposed a modification of the point contact transistor. He suggested using a thin layer of P-type semiconductor (in which the charge is carried by holes) sandwiched between two layers of N-type semiconductor (where the charge is carried by electrons). When Brattain built this device, now called the junction transistor, he found that it worked much better than did its point contact predecessor. In 1956, the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded jointly to Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain for their development of the transistor.

Shockley left Bell Labs in 1954 (some sources say 1955). In the decade that followed, he served as director of research for the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the Department of Defense, and as visiting professor at Caltech in 1954-55. He then founded the Shockley Transistor Corporation to turn his work on the development of the transistor to commercial advantage. Shockley Transistor was later incorporated into Beckman Instruments, Inc., and then into Clevite Transistor in 1960. The company went out of business in 1968.

In 1963, Shockley embarked on a new career, accepting an appointment at Stanford University as its first Alexander M. Poniatoff Professor of Engineering and Applied Science. Here he became interested in genetics and the origins of human intelligence, in particular, the relationship between race and the Intelligence Quotient (IQ). Although he had no background in psychology, genetics, or any related field, Shockley began to read on these topics and formulate his own hypotheses. Using data taken primarily from U.S. Army pre-induction IQ tests, Shockley came to the conclusion that the genetic component of a person's intelligence was based on racial heritage. He proposed that people of African ancestry were inherently less intelligent than those of Caucasian lineage. He also surmised that the more "white genes" a person of African descent carried, the more closely her or his intelligence corresponded to that of the general white population. He ignited further controversy with his suggestion that inferior individuals (those whose IQ numbered below 100) be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization.

The social implications of Shockley's theories were, and still are profound. Many scholars regarded Shockley's whole analysis as flawed, and they rejected his conclusions. Others were outraged that such views were even expressed publicly. Educators pointed out the significance of these theories for their field, a point pursued by Shockley himself when he argued that compensatory programs for blacks were doomed because of their inherent genetic inferiority. For a number of years, Shockley could count on the fact that his speeches would be interrupted by boos and catcalls, provided that they were allowed to go forward at all.

During his life, Shockley was awarded many honors, including the U.S. Medal of Merit in 1946, the Morris E. Liebmann Award of the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1951, the Comstock Prize of the National Academy of Sciences in 1954, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Gold Medal in 1972 and its Medal of Honor in 1980. He was named to the National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 1974. Shockley remained at Stanford until retirement in 1975, when he was appointed Emeritus Professor of Electrical Engineering. In 1933, Shockley had married Jean Alberta Bailey, with whom he had three children, Alison, William, and Richard. After their 1955 divorce, Shockley married Emily I. Lanning. He died in San Francisco on August 11, 1989, of prostate cancer.

Further Reading

McGraw-Hill Modern Scientists and Engineers, Volume 3, McGraw-Hill, 1980, pp. 111-12.

National Geographic Society, Special Publications Division, Those Inventive Americans, National Geographic Society, 1971, pp. 209-16.

Thomas, Shirley, Men of Space, Volume 4, Chilton Books, 1962, pp. 170-205.

Nobel Prize Winners, H. W. Wilson, 1987, pp. 962-64.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: William Bradford Shockley
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Shockley, William Bradford, 1910-89, American physicist, b. London. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology (B.S., 1932) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1936). After directing antisubmarine research for the U.S. Navy during World War II, he returned to work at Bell Laboratories. There he and two colleagues, John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain, produced the first transistor in 1947; for this work they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. Shockley taught electrical engineering at Stanford Univ. from 1958 to 1975. In the late 1960s and 1970s he became the center of controversy when he lectured on his theory that blacks were intellectually inferior and, by reproducing faster than whites, were causing a retrogression in human evolution. Most social scientists took issue with his interpretation of gross intelligence quotient (IQ) scores because he made no allowance for cultural and social influences.
Wikipedia: William Shockley
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For other uses, see William Shockley (disambiguation).
William Shockley

Born 13 February 1910(1910-02-13)
London, England,
United Kingdom
Died 12 August 1989 (aged 79)
Stanford, California,
United States
Nationality American
Institutions Bell Labs
Shockley Semiconductor
Stanford
Alma mater Caltech
MIT
Doctoral advisor John C. Slater
Known for Coinventor of the transistor
Notable awards Nobel Prize in Physics (1956)
Religious stance Atheism

William Bradford Shockley (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was an 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]

Contents

Biography

Early years

Shockley was born in London, England to American parents, and raised in his family's hometown of Palo Alto, 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 1933. In March 1934 Jean had a baby girl, Alison. Shockley was awarded his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. Notably, the title of his doctoral thesis was Electronic Bands in Sodium Chloride, and was suggested by his thesis advisor, John C. Slater. After receiving his doctorate, he joined a research group headed by Clinton Davisson at Bell Labs in New Jersey. The next few years were productive ones for Shockley. He published a number of fundamental papers on solid state physics in Physical Review. In 1938, he 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[2]. 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 for Merit on October 17, 1946.

In July 1945, the War Department asked Shockley to prepare a report on the question of probable casualties from an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Shockley concluded:

If the study shows that the behavior of nations in all historical cases comparable to Japan's has in fact been invariably consistent with the behavior of the troops in battle, then it means that the Japanese dead and ineffectives at the time of the defeat will exceed the corresponding number for the Germans. In other words, we shall probably have to kill at least 5 to 10 million Japanese. This might cost us between 1.7 and 4 million casualties including 400,000 to 800,000 killed.[3]

This prediction influenced the decision for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force Japan to surrender without an invasion.[4]

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 John Bardeen and Walter 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 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.[5] 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 did not evaporate. Finally they began to get some evidence of power amplification when Pearson, acting on a suggestion by Shockley, put a voltage on a droplet of gu placed across a P-N junction.[6]

December 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, who filed his MESFET-like patent in Canada already on October 22, 1925.[7][8] 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 commercially viable. 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's magnum opus

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.[9]

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 at 391 San Antonio Road. 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.[10] 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 (originally called a Shockley diode and now modified to become the thyristor), 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.[11] 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."[6]

He was an atheist, and never attended church.[12]

Later years

In July 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 human species, and came to describe it as the most important work of his career, even though expressing such politically unpopular views risked damaging 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."[13]

Shockley believed that the higher rate of reproduction among the less intelligent was having a dysgenic effect, and that a drop in average intelligence would ultimately lead to a decline in civilization. Shockley advocated that the scientific community should seriously investigate questions of heredity, intelligence and demographic trends, and suggest policy changes if he was proven right.

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.[14] Shockley reasoned that because intelligence (like most traits) is inherited, the black population would, over time, become much less intelligent countering all the gains that had been made by the Civil Rights movement. 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.[15]

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 US$1 in damages.[16][17]

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.[18]

Shockley has been described as a racist, white supremacist, and scientific racist. Eugenics advocate Ernst Mayr, in a letter to Francis Crick, wrote:

If I may summarize my own viewpoint, it is that positive eugenics is of great importance for the future of mankind and that all roadblocks must be removed that stand in the way of intensifying research in this area. Shockley with his racist views is unfortunately the worst roadblock at this time, at least in this country; hence, his sharp rejection by some of us who are very much in favor of positive eugenics. I do hope I have been able to shed light on our side of the argument.[19]

Edgar G. Epps argued that "William Shockley's position lends itself to racist interpretations".[20] Judith M. Scully called him "William Shockley, the notorious eugenicist and scientific racist".[21] Daniel J. Kevles mentioned that Shockley "invited ridicule as a racist and biological ignoramus".[22][23] Roger Pearson, another eugenicist, has defended Shockley, arguing that Shockley, being one of the first to break the taboo on frank discussion of racial differences, has been demonized by the popular media who created an unbalanced picture of his beliefs and opinions.[24]

Death

He died in 1989 of prostate cancer.[1]

By the time of his death he was almost completely estranged from most of his friends and family, except his wife. His children are reported to have learned of his death only through the print media.[25]

A group of about 30 colleagues, who have met on and off since 1956, met at Stanford in 2002 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."[26]

Honors

  • Nobel Prize in physics, 1956
  • 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:

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

Bibliography

Prewar scientific articles by Shockley

  • An Electron Microscope for Filaments: Emission and Adsorption by Tungsten Single Crystals, R. P. Johnson and W. Shockley, Phys. Rev. 49, 436 - 440 (1936).
  • Optical Absorption by the Alkali Halides, J. C. Slater and W. Shockley, Phys. Rev. 50, 705 - 719 (1936).
  • Electronic Energy Bands in Sodium Chloride, William Shockley, Phys. Rev. 50, 754 - 759 (1936).
  • The Empty Lattice Test of the Cellular Method in Solids, W. Shockley, Phys. Rev. 52, 866 - 872 (1937).
  • On the Surface States Associated with a Periodic Potential, William Shockley, Phys. Rev. 56, 317 - 323 (1939).
  • The Self-Diffusion of Copper, J. Steigman, W. Shockley and F. C. Nix, Phys. Rev. 56, 13 - 21 (1939).

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

  1. ^ a b "William B. Shockley, 79, Creator of Transistor and Theory on Race". New York Times. 14 August 1989. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0213.html. Retrieved 2007-07-21. "William Bradford Shockley, who shared a Nobel Prize in physics for his role in the creation of the transistor and earned the enmity of many for his views on the genetic differences between the races, died of cancer of the prostate at his home in California on Saturday. He was 79 years old and lived on the campus of Stanford University." 
  2. ^ Broken Genius p. 65–67
  3. ^ D. M. Giangreco, Casualty Projections For the U.S. Invasions Of Japan, 1945-1946, Journal of Military History, Vol. 61, No. 3 (July 1997), p. 568.
  4. ^ Robert P. Newman, "Hiroshima and the Trashing of Henry Stimson," New England Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 1 (March 1998), p. 27.
  5. ^ Brattain quoted in Crystal Fire p. 127
  6. ^ a b Crystal Fire p. 132
  7. ^ US patent 1745175 "Method and apparatus for controlling electric current" first filing in Canada on 22.10.1925
  8. ^ Lilienfeld
  9. ^ Crystal Fire p. 278
  10. ^ Crystal Fire p. 247
  11. ^ Crystal Fire p. 45
  12. ^ Crystal Fire p. 133
  13. ^ Shockley on Eugenics and Race p. 48
  14. ^ Shockley on Eugenics and Race p. 278
  15. ^ Polly Morrice (2005-07-03). "The Genius Factory: Test-Tube Superbabies". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/03/books/review/03MORRICE.html?ei=5088&en=859598b50aab62e1&ex=1278043200&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=all#. Retrieved 2008-02-12. 
  16. ^ Kessler, Ronald. "Absent at the Creation; How one scientist made off with the biggest invention since the light bulb". http://www1.hollins.edu/faculty/richter/327/AbsentCreation.htm. 
  17. ^ He was represented by Murray M. Silver, Esq., Attorney at Law, Atlanta, Georgia. See Time Magazine, September 24, 1984, Page 62.
  18. ^ Shockley on Genetics and Race p. 33
  19. ^ Mayr, Ernst (1971-04-14). "Letter to Francis Crick" (PDF). http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/SC/B/B/M/W/_/scbbmw.pdf. 
  20. ^ Epps, Edgar G (Jan-February 1973). "Racism, Science, and the I.Q.". Integrated Education 11 (1): 35–44. http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ070419&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ070419. 
  21. ^ Scully, Judith M.. "Cracking open CRACK: Unethical sterilization movement gains momentum" (PDF). Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment. http://cwpe.org/files/crackingcrack-scully.pdf. Retrieved 2008-04-12. 
  22. ^ Daniel J. Kevles (2007). "When science goes bad: Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age, by Joel N. Shurkin (book review)". Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 63: 73. doi:10.2968/063001022. http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/g28788431q63712x/. Retrieved 2008-04-12. 
  23. ^ Schneider, Howard (2006-01-09). "Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age, by Joel N. Shurkin (book review)". The Humanist. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-151548852.html. Retrieved 2008-04-12. 
  24. ^ Mark Ashton. "Who's a Genius? (book review of: Shockley on Eugenics and Race by Roger Pearson)". http://thescorp.multics.org/19schock.html. Retrieved 2008-04-12. 
  25. ^ Bill Shockley, Part 3 of 3
  26. ^ William Shockley: Still controversial, after all these years: 10/02

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Nobel Laureates in Physics

John Cockcroft / Ernest Walton (1951) · Felix Bloch / Edward Purcell (1952) · Frits Zernike (1953) · Max Born / Walther Bothe (1954) · Willis Lamb / Polykarp Kusch (1955) · William Shockley / John Bardeen / Walter Brattain (1956) · Chen Yang / T. D. Lee (1957) · Pavel Cherenkov / Ilya Frank / Igor Tamm (1958) · Emilio G. Segrè / Owen Chamberlain (1959) · Donald A. Glaser (1960) · Robert Hofstadter / Rudolf Mössbauer (1961) · Lev Landau (1962) · E. P. Wigner / Maria Goeppert-Mayer / J. Hans D. Jensen (1963) · Charles Townes / Nikolay Basov / Alexander Prokhorov (1964) · Sin-Itiro Tomonaga / Julian Schwinger / Richard Feynman (1965) · Alfred Kastler (1966) · Hans Bethe (1967) · Luis Alvarez (1968) · Murray Gell-Mann (1969) · Hannes Alfvén / Louis Néel (1970) · Dennis Gabor (1971) · John Bardeen / Leon Cooper / John Schrieffer (1972) · Leo Esaki / Ivar Giaever / Brian Josephson (1973) · Martin Ryle / Antony Hewish (1974) · A. Bohr / Ben Mottelson / James Rainwater (1975)
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IEEE Medal of Honor
1976-2000

H. Earle Vaughan (1977) · Robert Noyce (1978) · Richard Bellman (1979) · William Shockley (1980) · Sidney Darlington (1981) · John Tukey (1982) · Nicolaas Bloembergen (1983) · Norman F. Ramsey (1984) · John Roy Whinnery (1985) · Jack Kilby (1986) · Paul Lauterbur (1987) · Calvin Quate (1988) · C. Kumar Patel (1989) · Robert G. Gallager (1990) · Leo Esaki (1991) · Amos E. Joel, Jr. (1992) · Karl Johan Åström (1993) · Alfred Y. Cho (1994) · Lotfi Asker Zadeh (1995) · Robert Metcalfe (1996) · George H. Heilmeier (1997) · Donald Pederson (1998) · Charles Concordia (1999) · Andrew Grove (2000)
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