Biographies of Silicon Valley protagonists

A History of Silicon Valley

This biography is an appendix to my book "A History of Silicon Valley"

Biographies | History pages | Editor | Correspondence

William Shockley

William Shockley (Britain, 1910) grew up in an aristocratic Palo Alto family. His mother had graduated from Stanford and his father was an MIT-trained mining businessmen. After studies at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he graduated in electrical engineering from the MIT in 1936. He joined Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he worked on solid-state physics. During the war he worked for the military with a lab at Columbia University and frequent sojourns in Washington. In order to improve vacuum-tube amplifiers, Bell Labs created a team under Shockley and chemist Stanley Morgan to study solid-state amplifiers. The team included John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, Gerald Pearson, Robert Gibney and Hilbert Moore. They all contributed something to the invention of the transistor, officially announced in december 1947. Shockley continued to develop the transistor while alienating the rest of the team. Eventually in 1953 Bell Labs became a hostile environment for him and he decided to move back to California. His old friend Arnold Beckman had opened an electronics firm, a CalTech spin-off called Beckman Instruments. Beckman offered to open an entire research laboratory for transistors. At the same time Fred Terman convinced Shockley to return to his hometown of Palo Alto, where Stanford had put together one of the nation's top electrical engineering departments. In 1956 the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division opened in Mountain View to work on semiconductor-based transistors that would replace vacuum tubes. Shockley's transistors had used germanium but he was aware that in 1954 Texas Instruments had introduced silicon transistors, and knew it was the right direction. He tried in vain to convince former coworkers at Bell Labs to follow him west. Eventually he settled on hiring young local engineers, such as Philco's physicist Robert Noyce and CalTech's chemist Gordon Moore. However, his paranoid manners quickly led to a divorce from which Fairchild Semiconductor was born. Forced to abandon his own lab, in 1963 Shockley was hired by Stanford, where he began a completely different line of research: eugenetics.

History of Silicon Valley | Biographies | History pages | Editor | Correspondence