Shockley once explained the concept of amplification this way: ″If you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification.″ With Shockley and Bardeen as theoreticians and Brattain as the experimenter, the team resumed war-postponed efforts to create a solid-state device that would - like the more vulnerable, bulkier and power-hungry vacuum tubes of the day - amplify electronic signals. Bardeen joined Bell Labs about that time. Shockley went to work for the government, and did not return to Bell Labs until 1945. in the then-esoteric field of solid-state physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1932 and joined the staff of American Telephone & Telegraph Co’s Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., in 1936.Īfter a year of working on vacuum tubes being designed to replace the mechanical switches used in telephone exchanges, Shockley resumed his research on how electrons behaved with crystals. He was fond of pointing out that Terman passed over two later Nobel Prize winners. He was one of the children tested in Louis Terman’s classic study of gifted children but failed to test high enough to advance to the follow-up study. Shockley, whose father was mining engineer and whose grandfather was a whaling captain, was born in London and grew up in Palo Alto, near the same campus where he died. ″I think he very much would have liked to have found a black person who would be a personal friend,″ said Spicer.Īt the age of 68, he contributed his sperm to the Repository for Germinal Choice in Escondido, Calif., a sperm bank that founders said was designed to help pass on the genetic makeup of ″geniuses.″ Spicer, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, said that Shockley in his later years tried several times to reach out to black people. His wife, Emmy, said Shockley considered his research on intelligence his most valuable work and that he continued to write papers on the subject until a few days before his death.Įven so, one friend, William E. Supreme Court in 1986 turned down Shockley’s attempt to revive the lawsuit.

A federal jury awarded him $1 in the case, and the U.S. Many of his scientific colleagues ridiculed his racial theory and abandoned their association with him, claiming he had passed beyond his field of expertise and was acting irresponsibly.Ī 1980 article in The Atlanta Constitution comparing Shockley’s theories to Nazism drew a libel suit from Shockley, who sued the newspaper for $1.25 million. His claims contributed to debate over the use of IQ tests in schools and over why black Americans failed to score as well as whites, an outcome most experts blamed on biased tests and other factors not related to genetics. He suggested in a theory he called ″retrogressive evolution″ that intellectually inferior blacks were producing child faster than mentally superior whites. Shockley’s later life was marked by bitter controversy over his claims that intelligence was genetically determined and that blacks were genetically inferior and as a group could not be as bright as whites. ″He was very attractive to bright young people, but hard as hell to work with,″ Frederick Terman, a Stanford University assistant provost who was instrumental in the birth of Silicon Valley, once said. Shockley’s reputation attracted bright young physicists and engineers away from East Coast firms, and his former employees went on to invent the integrated circuit and the microprocessor. Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories, the company he founded after leaving Bell labs in 1954, was instrumental in the birth of Silicon Valley and the electronics industry. ″He made enormous contribution through his discovery of the transistor.″ Goodman, chairman of the electrical engineering department at Stanford. ″It’s a great loss for Stanford,″ said Joseph W. Most modern devices, from airplanes to wristwatches to computers, contain the technical descendants of Shockley’s work. The team’s first semiconductor device, developed during what they later called a ″magic month″ during 1947, was an innovation that made the electronic age possible. Shockley, who was professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford, shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956 with his colleagues from Bell Laboratories, John Bardeen and the late Walter H. Shockley died Saturday of prostate cancer, Stanford University announced Sunday. (AP) _ William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and Nobel Prize winner whose later life became embroiled in controversy over his racial theories, died of cancer at his home here.

Inventor of transistor