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| File:William Shockley.gif | |
| Born | 13 February 1910 London, England |
| Died | 12 August 1989 Stanford, California |
| Alma mater | Caltech MIT |
| Known for | Coinventor of the transistor |
| Awards | Nobel Prize in Physics (1956) |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Bell Labs Shockley Semiconductor Stanford |
| Doctoral advisor | John C. Slater |
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 '60s led to San Francisco's "Silicon Valley" becoming a hotbed of computer innovation.
In his later life, Shockley was a professor at Stanford, and he also became a staunch advocate of eugenics.
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. Shockely 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 soon 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. 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, 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 Shockely -- 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. 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. He was dissatisfied with certain explanations 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.
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.
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.
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 their invention.
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. 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. 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 essentially superfluous.
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."
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.
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. In the August, 2006 issue of Discover, Susan Kruglinski wrote:
- in the view of many, 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.
- " 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."
Shockley believed that the higher rate of reproduction among African Americans was having a "dysgenic" effect, and expressed an interest in eugenics. Shockley's published writings on this topic, such as in letters to the editor of the Palo Alto Times, were largely based on the research of Cyril Burt. Shockley also proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization. He was subsequently attacked in the media, for eugenics had become unpopular after its manifestations under the Nazis in WWII.
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.
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.
- Holley Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1963.
Patents
Shockley was granted over ninety US patents.
- Shockley, U.S. patent 2,502,488 "Semiconductor amplifier". April 4, 1950.
Books by Shockley
- Shockley, William Electrons and holes in semiconductors, with applications to transistor electronics, Krieger (1956) ISBN 0882753827.
- Shockley, William and Pearson, Roger Shockley on Eugenics and Race: The Application of Science to the Solution of Human Problems Scott-Townsend (1992) ISBN 1878465031.
- Shockley, William Mechanics Merrill (1966).
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.
References
- Brattain quoted in Crystal Fire p. 127
- Crystal Fire p. 132
- Crystal Fire p. 278
- Crystal Fire p. 247
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.
- American physicists
- American eugenicists
- American inventors
- Nobel laureates in Physics
- Scientists at Bell Labs
- Race and intelligence controversy
- IEEE Medal of Honor recipients
- Inventors
- Members and associates of the US National Academy of Sciences
- National Inventors Hall of Fame
- Prostate cancer deaths
- People from Silicon Valley
- 1910 births
- 1989 deaths