William Bradford Shockley (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was an American physicist. He was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect."
Partly as a result of Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s, California's Silicon Valley became a hotbed of electronics innovation. He recruited brilliant employees, but quickly alienated them with his autocratic and erratic management; they left and founded major companies in the industry.
In his later life, while he was a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and afterward, Shockley became known for his outspoken promotion of racism and eugenics.
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Early life and education
William Bradford Shockley was born on February 13, 1910, in London to American parents, and was raised in the family's hometown of Palo Alto, California, from the age of three. His father, William Hillman Shockley, was a mining engineer who speculated in mines for a living and spoke eight languages. His mother, May Bradford, grew up in the American West, graduated from Stanford University, and became the first female U.S. deputy mining surveyor.
Shockley was homeschooled up to the age of eight, due to his parents' dislike of public schools as well as Shockley's habit of violent tantrums. Shockley learned some physics at a young age from a neighbor who was a Stanford physics professor. Shockley spent two years at Palo Alto Military Academy, then briefly enrolled in the Los Angeles Coaching School to study physics and later graduated from Hollywood High School in 1927.
Shockley obtained a B.S. from the California Institute of Technology in 1932. He then entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his Ph.D. in 1936 with a thesis on the electronic band structure of sodium chloride.
Career and research
Shockley was one of the first recruits to Bell Telephone Laboratories by Mervin Kelly, who became director of research at the company in 1936 and focused on hiring solid-state physicists. Shockley joined a group headed by Clinton Davisson in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Executives at Bell Labs had theorized that semiconductors may offer solid-state alternatives to the vacuum tubes used throughout Bell's nationwide telephone system. Shockley conceived a number of designs based on copper-oxide semiconductor materials, and collaborated with Walter Brattain's unsuccessful attempt to create a prototype in 1939.
Shockley published a number of fundamental papers on solid-state physics in Physical Review. In 1938, he received his first patent, "Electron Discharge Device", on electron multipliers.
During World War II, Shockley's prior research was interrupted and he became involved in radar research in Manhattan (New York City). Also at Bell, early in 1942 Shockley pioneered applied work on Delay-line memory, which was 1/100th the cost of competing electronic memory of vacuum tube technology and approximately as rapid. This technology was incorporated inside the ENIAC computer by 1945.
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. Shockley traveled frequently to the Pentagon and Washington to meet 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.
Invention of the transistor
Shortly after the war ended in 1945, Bell Labs formed a solid-state physics group, led by Shockley and chemist Stanley Morgan, which included John Bardeen, 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. 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 group had excellent rapport and freely exchanged ideas.
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. 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 glycol borate placed across a p–n junction.
Bell Labs' attorneys soon discovered Shockley's field effect principle had been anticipated and devices based on it patented in 1930 by Julius Lilienfeld, who filed his MESFET-like patent in Canada on October 22, 1925. 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 first) 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.
Shockley Semiconductor
In 1956, Shockley started Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, which was close to his elderly mother in Palo Alto, California. The company, a division of Beckman Instruments, Inc., was the first establishment working on silicon semiconductor devices in what came to be known as Silicon Valley.
Shockley recruited brilliant employees to his company, but alienated them by undermining them relentlessly. "He may have been the worst manager in the history of electronics", according to his biographer Joel Shurkin. Shockley was autocratic, domineering, erratic, hard-to-please, and increasingly paranoid. In one well-known incident, he demanded lie detector tests to find the "culprit" after a company secretary suffered a minor cut. In late 1957, eight of Shockley's best researchers, who would come to be known as the "traitorous eight", resigned after Shockley decided not to continue research into silicon-based semiconductors; they went on to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Shockley Semiconductor never recovered from this loss. The company was purchased by Clevite in 1960, sold again to ITT in 1968, and shortly after, officially closed.
Over the course of the next 20 years, more than 65 new enterprises would end up having employee connections back to Fairchild.
A group of about thirty colleagues have met on and off since 1956 to reminisce about their time with Shockley, "the man who brought silicon to Silicon Valley", as the group's organizer said in 2002.
Racist and eugenicist views
After Shockley left his role as Director of Shockley Semiconductor in April 1960, he joined Stanford University, where he was appointed Alexander M. Poniatoff Professor of Engineering and Applied Science in 1963, a position he held until his retirement in 1975.
In the last two decades of his life, Shockley, who had no degree in genetics, became widely known for his extreme views on race and human intelligence, and his advocacy of eugenics. As described by his Los Angeles Times obituary, "He went from being a physicist with impeccable academic credentials to amateur geneticist, becoming a lightning rod whose views sparked campus demonstrations and a cascade of calumny." He thought his work was important to the future of humanity and he also described it as the most important aspect of his career. He argued that a higher rate of reproduction among purportedly less intelligent people was having a dysgenic effect, and argued that a drop in average intelligence would lead to a decline in civilization. He also claimed that black people were genetically and intellectually inferior to white people.
Shockley's biographer Joel Shurkin notes that for much of Shockley's life in the racially segregated United States of the time, he had almost no contact with black people. Bo Lojek, a biographer and former colleague of Shockley, suggests that a 1963 local crime news story and shortly later a forwarded J. P. Guilford article influenced Shockley's thinking.
Shockley was one of the race theorists who received money from the Pioneer Fund, and at least one donation to him came from its founder, the eugenicist Wickliffe Draper. Shockley proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 should be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization, $1,000 for each of their IQ points under 100. This proposal led to the University of Leeds to withdraw its offer of an honorary degree to him. Anthropologist and far-right activist Roger Pearson defended Shockley in a self-published book co-authored with Shockley.
In 1973, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee professor Edgar G. Epps argued that "William Shockley's position lends itself to racist interpretations". On Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. in 1974, Shockley argued, "My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and, thus, not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in the environment."
Foundation for Research and Education on Eugenics and Dysgenics
The Foundation for Research and Education on Eugenics and Dysgenics (FREED) was a non-profit organization founded in March 1970 in the United States formed to support the research of Shockley, who was the president of the foundation and R. Travis Osborne, a member. The foundation released the newsletter "FREED" and research papers at Stanford University.
The organization was founded according to its mission "solely for scientific and educational purposes related to human population and quality problems".
From 1969 to 1976, the Pioneer Fund allocated about $2.5 million (adjusted-for-inflation in 2023) to support Shockley's endeavors. This funding was distributed through grants to Stanford University for the exploration of "research into the factors which affect genetic potential" and also directly to FREED.
Via FREED, Shockley promoted his concept of a "Voluntary Sterilization Bonus Plan", proposing to compensate economically disadvantaged women for undergoing sterilization procedures.
In 1970, Shockley listed former senator of Alaska Ernest Gruening as a director of FREED.
Personal life
At age 23 and while still a student, Shockley married Jean Bailey in August 1933. The couple had two sons and a daughter. Shockley separated from her in 1953. He married Emily Lanning, a psychiatric nurse, in 1955; she helped him with some of his theories. Although one of his sons earned a PhD at Stanford University and his daughter graduated from Radcliffe College, Shockley believed his children "represent a very significant regression ... my first wife – their mother – had not as high an academic-achievement standing as I had".
Shockley was an accomplished rock climber, going often to the Shawangunks in the Hudson River Valley. His 1953 route known as "Shockley's Ceiling", is one of the classic climbing routes in the area. Mountain Project, a web-based climbing guidebook, reports that the route's name has been changed to "The Ceiling" due to Shockley's eugenics controversies. A 1996 guidebook notes that the original party on this route avoided the ceiling in question. The guidebook lists this variation as "Shockley's Without." He was popular as a speaker, lecturer, and amateur magician. He once "magically" produced a bouquet of roses at the end of his address before the American Physical Society.
Shockley was also known in his early years for elaborate practical jokes. He had a longtime hobby of raising ant colonies.
Shockley 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 involvement. However, Shockley's controversial views brought the Repository for Germinal Choice a degree of notoriety and may have discouraged other Nobel Prize winners from donating sperm.
Shockley was unhappy in his life and was often psychologically and sometimes physically abusive toward his sons. On one occasion, he reportedly played Russian roulette on himself as part of a suicide attempt.
Shockley died of prostate cancer on August 12, 1989, in Stanford, California, at the age of 79. At the time of his death he was estranged from most of his friends and family, with the exception of his second wife. His children learned of his death by reading his obituary in the newspaper. He is buried in Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, California.
Recognition
Patents
Shockley was granted over 90 US patents. Some notable ones are:
US 2502488 Semiconductor Amplifier. April 4, 1950; his first granted patent involving transistors.
US 2569347 Circuit element utilizing semiconductive material. September 25, 1951; His earliest applied for (June 26, 1948) patent involving transistors.
US 2655609 Bistable Circuits. October 13, 1953; Used in computers.
US 2787564 Forming Semiconductive Devices by Ionic Bombardment. April 2, 1957; The diffusion process for implantation of impurities.
US 3031275 Process for Growing Single Crystals. April 24, 1962; Improvements on process for production of basic materials.
US 3053635 Method of Growing Silicon Carbide Crystals. September 11, 1962; Exploring other semiconductors.
Publications
Pre-war articles
Johnson, R. P.; Shockley, W. (March 15, 1936). "An Electron Microscope for Filaments: Emission and Adsorption by Tungsten Single Crystals". Physical Review. 49 (6). American Physical Society (APS): 436–440. Bibcode:1936PhRv...49..436J. doi:10.1103/physrev.49.436. ISSN 0031-899X.
Slater, J. C.; Shockley, W. (October 15, 1936). "Optical Absorption by the Alkali Halides". Physical Review. 50 (8). American Physical Society (APS): 705–719. Bibcode:1936PhRv...50..705S. doi:10.1103/physrev.50.705. ISSN 0031-899X.
Shockley, William (October 15, 1936). "Electronic Energy Bands in Sodium Chloride". Physical Review. 50 (8). American Physical Society (APS): 754–759. Bibcode:1936PhRv...50..754S. doi:10.1103/physrev.50.754. ISSN 0031-899X.
Shockley, W. (October 15, 1937). "The Empty Lattice Test of the Cellular Method in Solids". Physical Review. 52 (8). American Physical Society (APS): 866–872. Bibcode:1937PhRv...52..866S. doi:10.1103/physrev.52.866. ISSN 0031-899X.
Shockley, William (August 15, 1939). "On the Surface States Associated with a Periodic Potential". Physical Review. 56 (4). American Physical Society (APS): 317–323. Bibcode:1939PhRv...56..317S. doi:10.1103/physrev.56.317. ISSN 0031-899X.
Steigman, J.; Shockley, W.; Nix, F. C. (July 1, 1939). "The Self-Diffusion of Copper". Physical Review. 56 (1). American Physical Society (APS): 13–21. Bibcode:1939PhRv...56...13S. doi:10.1103/physrev.56.13. ISSN 0031-899X.
Post-war articles
Shockley, W. (1949). "The Theory of p-n Junctions in Semiconductors and p-n Junction Transistors". Bell System Technical Journal. 28 (3). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): 435–489. Bibcode:1949BSTJ...28..435S. doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1949.tb03645.x. ISSN 0005-8580.
Shockley, W.; Pearson, G. L.; Haynes, J. R. (1949). "Hole Injection in Germanium-Quantitative Studies and Filamentary Transistors". Bell System Technical Journal. 28 (3). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): 344–366. Bibcode:1949BSTJ...28..344S. doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1949.tb03641.x. ISSN 0005-8580.
Shockley, W. (1951). "Hot Electrons in Germanium and Ohm's Law". Bell System Technical Journal. 30 (4). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): 990–1034. doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1951.tb03692.x. ISSN 0005-8580.
Shockley, W. (1954). "Negative Resistance Arising from Transit Time in Semiconductor Diodes". Bell System Technical Journal. 33 (4). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): 799–826. Bibcode:1954BSTJ...33..799S. doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1954.tb03742.x. ISSN 0005-8580.
Sze, S. M.; Shockley, W. (May 6, 1967). "Unit-Cube Expression for Space-Charge Resistance". Bell System Technical Journal. 46 (5). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): 837–842. Bibcode:1967BSTJ...46..837S. doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1967.tb01716.x. ISSN 0005-8580.
"On the Statistics of Individual Variations of Productivity in Research Laboratories", Shockley 1957
On heredity, dysgenics and social issues:
Shockley 1965, "Is Quality of US Population Declining." U.S. News & World Report, November 22, pp. 68–71
Shockley 1966, "Possible Transfer of Metallurgical and Astronomical Approaches to Problem of Environment versus Ethnic Heredity" (on an early form of admixture analysis)
Books
Shockley, William – Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors with Applications to Transistor Electronics, Krieger (1956) ISBN 0-88275-382-7
Shockley, William and Gong, Walter A – Mechanics Charles E. Merrill, Inc. (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
Interviews
Interview of William Shockley by Lillian Hoddeson on 1974 Sep. 10, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA
Playboy 1980, William Shockley interview with Playboy