William Bradford Shockley Jr was born on the 13th of February in 1910 in London. While having been born in London, Shockley’s parents were American, and at the age of three, he and his family returned to Palo Alto. Shockley’s parents were involved in the mining industry, and they homeschooled him until he was eight, and they then supplemented his education with physics taught to him by a local professor. While his parents weren’t especially fond of public education, that wasn’t really the primary reason for the young Shockley’s homeschooling. Shockley was an angry kid with a violent temper. He was prone to biting and slapping his parents, with his father having written of him “it is an odd day when he does not break something.” The couple then sent their son to the Homer Avenue School for two years where his behavior improved considerably. To provide him further discipline and self-control, Shockley was then enrolled at the the Palo Alto Military Academy. His father passed away in 1925, and Shockley moved with his mother to Los Angeles where he first attended the Los Angeles Coaching School and then Hollywood High School. After graduating in 1927, he went to CalTech from which he earned his Bachelor of Science in 1932. Shockley then earned his PhD from MIT in 1936.
John L. Moll stated of Shockley around this time that it was clear to him that Shockley was unusually intelligent. He noted that Shockley was able to determine the core issues in a scientific problem either through theoretical or experimental methods and then understand and communicate those issues in a dramatically clear way. While often impatient, he was apparently bright enough that this wasn’t quite the impediment it could have been. While he often published findings before experimental verification could be completed, he was also most often correct. Moll’s measure of Shockley was that he had a mind that was every bit as powerful as Enrico Fermi’s though in a different area of physics. Moll, however, noted that Shockley had little empathy, was prone to intellectual elitism, believed in eugenics, and was a racist. These negative aspects of Shockley were apparently present even at this early phase of life. Moll also noted that Shockley had hobby pursuits including slight of hand parlor tricks, rock climbing, raising ant colonies, and driving automobiles at high speeds.
Having graduated from MIT, Shockley started his career at Bell Labs in New Jersey. His first project was the design of an electron multiplier tube. Then in 1939, he proposed a field effect transistor design using wires embedded in CuO2 with the goal of replacing mechanical relays and vacuum tubes. This didn’t work, but it did have a rather significant impact at the lab.
This early era of Shockley’s work was interrupted by WWII. His first war time assignment involved the design of radar equipment at Bell Labs, and he was then made the research director of the Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group at Columbia University from 1942 to 1944. His primary focus in this position was around the patterning of depth charges and timing of aerial bombardments. From 1944 to 1945, he was a consultant to the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson.
Toward the end of 1945, Shockley returned to Bell Labs where he led a research group with chemist Stanley Morgan working on semiconductor physics. Among this group were John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, Gerald Pearson, Morgan Sparks, and 29 others. Shockley hadn’t forgotten the transistor, and he began working toward this once again. Shockley’s own experiments failed, but Bardeen then suggested that the electrons were trapped in surface states preventing the electric field from penetrating the silicon crystal. This led to a series of experiments on surface effects which resulted in the discovery of minority carrier injection by the point contact emitter. The point contact transistor effect was then demonstrated to management at Bell Labs by Brattain and Bardeen on Christmas Eve in 1947. Shockley wasn’t pleased that to have learned of the discovery over the phone, and he was even less pleased that he was left off the patent application. Nevertheless, he continued his own work which resulted in his invention of the junction transistor. The patent was filed on the 26th of June in 1948, and the first proof of principle was obtained on the 7th of April in 1949. This time around, Shockley immediately published his findings in the Bell Labs Technical Journal. Building on the piece in the journal, he then wrote Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors which was published in 1950. This became the first widely-used textbook for those studying or working with semiconductors. Less than a year later, on the 4th of July in 1951, Shockley’s invention of the bipolar junction transistor was announced at a press conference.
The picture of Shockley given by his parents and Moll isn’t the best. Shockley was clearly a brilliant physicist and engineer, but I do not get the impression of him being a particularly kind or generous person. He said of his own children that they represented “a very significant regression” in his genetic line, and I’ve seen his parenting described as cold and even cruel. This temperament apparently extended to his professional comportment, and didn’t help him at Bell Labs. It should, therefore, come as little surprise that Shockley did not remain at Bell Labs. He left in 1953, and he moved back to California. He then did some lectures at CalTech in 1954 and 1955, but he was still also serving the US government as an advisor and as the deputy director of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the DoD.
On the 2nd of February in 1955, William Shockley and Lee De Forest were honored at a gala Los Angeles, Shockley for his work on transistors and De Forest for his work on vacuum tubes. At that gala, Shockley met Arnold Beckman. The two men were rather impressed with each other. Beckman had been working to automate his various factories, and this was a subject in which Shockley was highly interested. Having worked on self-guided missile projects, he understood that it should be possible for a machine to see and carry out automated tasks. The first step toward such automation, in Shockley’s mind, was the robotic eye for which he’d recently received a patent, and through their conversation at the gala, Shockley promised to send a copy of the patent to Beckman. Shockley immediately pursued trying to create a company around robotics with Beckman, but Beckman rejected the proposal due to there not being any viable application in a time horizon that would make sense.
After the gala, Shockley took note of several advancements in chemistry, most importantly float-zone refining and doping, in March of 1955. These advancements meant that it would be possible to commercialize semiconductor products. He then approached RCA, Raytheon, and Texas Instruments. These companies weren’t interested. Shockley reached out to his new acquaintance and fellow CalTech alumnus, Arnold Beckman (founder and president of Beckman Industries) in July. Unlike the pitch for robotics, Beckman was extremely interested in transistors and other semiconductor products, and the two met in Newport Beach on the 23rd of September in 1955 to sign the contracts that would start the company. The agreement they reached was that Shockley’s new company would be formed as a division of Beckman Industries for its first two years of operation, and would work to form an automatic production method for diffused-base transistors and then sell transistors made with such methods. After two years, the company could be spun off but both Beckman and Shockley would retain large portions of ownership.
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory was legally formed and funded, and Bill Shockley rented 391 South San Antonio Road in Mountain View. Silicon Valley now existed, though no one knew it yet. Shockley now needed employees, and he was a man who was widely regarded to have talent in picking talent. As is now obvious, Shockley wasn’t a well liked man, and few of his colleagues wanted to work with him. Of those who might’ve worked with him, they had no interest in leaving New Jersey, so he started looking at recent graduates. His attachment to Stanford as a visiting professor helped him gain some, but Shockley traveled the country looking for the best and brightest. For example, he hired Jean Amédée Hoerni from Caltech, Jay Last from MIT, Robert Noyce from Philco, and Gordon Moore from John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.
Shockley, despite his genius, was reportedly among the worst possible bosses one could ever have. A metallurgist at the company, Sheldon Roberts, described Shockley:
When he hired you, you were the greatest person in the world, then slowly you worked your way down the line. First you were brilliant. Then, ‘You’re doing a good job.’ Then, ‘You’re capable, but I’m unsure about you … Now I’m really unsure … Now I think you’re inadequate. I don’t think you can do the job for me.’ He kept a black book on everybody.
While Shockley didn’t abandon transistors, he did come up with the idea for a four layer diode. This is a breakover diode, similar to a dynistor, and can remain on or off as needed within a circuit. As Shockley felt that this would be an extremely important piece of technology, he kept it quite secret, but this secrecy fed paranoia. Fearing that there was a plot afoot to injure him (a secretary cut her finger on a thumb tack stuck in a door), he ordered polygraphs of his employees. He cooled off, but that didn’t actually help the company much. He then started to shift focus and priority, seemingly at random, between the diode project and transistor mass production efforts. At this point, he was described as having reverse charisma, when Shockley walked into a room, people were rather instantly convinced that they disliked him.
On the 8th of December in 1956, the senior staff at the company wrote to Beckman asking that the company focus on silicon bipolar transistors exclusively, that a new manager be appointed, and finally that Shockley should just go teach and act as an advisor to the company but no longer have any hand in managing the company. The let letter closed with, “please help us immediately.” Initially, Beckman agreed, but he met with Shockley and chose to do nothing. Shockley had just won the Nobel prize and his placement within the company lent it some shine.
With company finances running thin both for Shockley Semiconductor and Beckman Industries more generally, this tension between Bill Shockley and the team only got worse. In July of 1957, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts met at Gordon Moore’s home in Los Altos. Their appeal to Beckman had failed, and they needed to do something. They came to an agreement that they’d all leave to work at a new company that actually wanted to build silicon transistors, but in the interim they’d keep up appearances at Shockley Semiconductor while Gene Kleiner’s dad reached out to friends of his in the banking industry to find just such a company. This didn’t work out.
The traitorous eight decided it was time to start their own company, and they met with Sherman Fairchild who was the founder and CEO of Fairchild Camera and Instrument. They reached an agreement for $1.4 million for the first 18 months of operation and more money contingent on progress. That would be roughly $16 million in 2024 dollars. All eight resigned on the 18th of September in 1957. The following day, they signed the contract that created Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation at 844 South Charleston Road. The company produced its first bipolar silicon transistor just 6 months later.
Shockley Semiconductor did succeed in producing what became known as the Shockley diode. Around the time that Fairchild began volume production of transistors, Shockley Semiconductor was producing about 1000 diodes per month, and these were mostly sold to the US military. Shockley had hoped to sell his diodes to Western Electric for telephone switching, but he lost. Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory was sold to Clevite Inc for $1 million in 1960. Bill Shockley then went to Stanford where he served as Professor of Engineering Science. He ran for the Republican nomination for the Senate in 1982 on a racist and eugenicist platform. He won just 0.37% of the vote. William Bradford Shockley died of prostate cancer in 1989. No services were held for him, and his children learned of his death from obituaries in the newspaper. Ultimately, despite his other failings, his contribution to the world was in two parts. He brought us the bipolar transistor, and he brought together the people who’d go on to build the modern world.
All corrections to the record are welcome; feel free to leave a comment.
