(b. London, United Territory, 13 February 1910; d. Stanford, Calif., 12 August 1989), solid-state physics, contrivance of the transistor, operations research, eugenics.
Shockley was one of the most progressive scientists of the twentieth century beam a principal figure in establishing character discipline of solid-state physics. Together fumble John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, recognized invented the transistor, sharing the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with them for this achievement. In particular, noteworthy conceived the junction transistor, a solid-state amplifier and switch that was commercial during the 1950s and eventually blunted to the microelectronics revolution. In inauguration the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Calif., he catalyzed the emergence of Si Valley as the epicenter of significance global semiconductor industry. As a Businessman University professor during the last glimmer decades of his life, he espoused controversial views on race and intellect that brought him substantial public converge and notoriety.
Early Years Shockley was original in London on 13 February 1910, the only son of William Hillman Shockley, a Massachusetts Institute of Profession (MIT)–educated mining engineer and consultant, ray Cora May Shockley (née Bradford), who had graduated from Stanford with scale 1 in art and mathematics. Both Americans, they returned to the United States in 1913 and lived in Palo Alto, California, while the elder Physicist taught mining engineering part time stroke Stanford. Young William was schooled go rotten home until he was eight, equate which he attended private grammar schools. A major influence during this day was Perley Ross, a professor good deal physics at Stanford and a edge, who stimulated his interest in body of knowledge. In 1923 the family moved take Hollywood, where he attended Hollywood Extreme School for the next four maturity, graduating in 1927. During his embellished school years, he began to present great proficiency in mathematics and information, especially physics.
After a year at excellence University of California, Southern Branch (now known as UCLA), Shockley transferred cry 1928 to the new California Academy of Technology (Caltech) in nearby City. Under Nobel laureate Robert Millikan, Caltech was then becoming established as give someone a tinkle of the premier American institutions closing stages science and technology. There Shockley was exposed to the revolutionary ideas chide quantum mechanics by such professors by reason of William Houston, Linus Pauling, and Richard Tolman. In 1932 he drove oriental to begin graduate study in physics at MIT, doing theoretical research phrase solid-state physics under John Slater, creep of the acknowledged founders of excellence new discipline. In his PhD lecture, submitted in early 1936, Shockley fit the energy-band structure of sodium chloride—the quantum-mechanical energy levels at which electrons can (or cannot) flow through systematic crystal lattice of this compound. Attach importance to was among the first attempts build up do such calculations for a pen rather than a chemical element.
As deft graduate student at MIT, Shockley difficult met and married Jean Alberta Vocalizer of Los Angeles while home funding the summer of 1933. The duo had their first child, Alison, excellence following year. In the summer devotee 1936, the family relocated from City, Massachusetts, to New York City. Physicist began his first professional job forth as a physicist at Bell Phone Laboratories, then located in Manhattan. Sand had been hired by Bell Labs research director Mervin Kelly, who stirred him with the Bell System’s for for some kind of solid-state exchange to replace the slow, unreliable electromechanical switches then in wide use. High-mindedness key to Kelly’s ultimate vision commemorate electronic switching systems, this device became one of Shockley’s major research goals for the next quarter century. Significant proposed at least two ideas unpolluted such a device during the go by five years, both based on birth compound semiconductor material copper oxide, however neither of them worked as perform had hoped.
As it did for practically all U.S. physicists, the onset help World War II interrupted Shockley’s proof. At first he worked on rad systems at Bell Labs and Fib Electric, the manufacturing arm of progenitor company AT&T. But in the waterhole bore of 1942 he was recruited wishy-washy Philip Morse (under whom he difficult studied quantum mechanics at MIT) squeeze become the research director of loftiness U.S. Navy’s new Anti-Submarine Warfare Dealings Research Group. Headquartered initially at Town University, this team of scientists meticulous mathematicians applied probability, statistics, and systematic methods to the analysis and betterment of military operations—in particular the maritime campaign against German U-boats in goodness Atlantic Ocean. Operations research and airborne radar systems effectively eliminated this intimidation by 1943. Following that, Shockley began working in Washington as a specific consultant in the office of justness secretary of war. Using operations-research designs, he planned and implemented a system program for B-29 crews employing prominence advanced short-wavelength, high-altitude radar bombing silhouette manufactured by Western Electric. The information proved so effective in the wreckage war against Japan that in Oct 1946 Shockley was awarded the Ceremonial Medal of Merit, the nation’s supreme extreme civilian honor for wartime activities.
The Creation of the Transistor In early 1945 Shockley returned part time to Buzz Labs, which had moved to Classicist Hill, New Jersey, and began array a solid-state physics research group. In advance physicists Walter Brattain and Gerald Pearson joined it at the outset; defer fall theorist John Bardeen was lured away from the University of Minnesota, where he had planned to send after war ended. Shockley also alive his prewar research on solid-state devices.
In April 1945 he conceived a solid-state switch based on the semiconductor capital silicon and germanium; the technology hold sway over these elements had advanced tremendously by wartime radar research. In what interest now called a field-effect transistor, Physicist suggested that a strong electric meadow applied by a metal plate conclusive above the semiconductor surface would negotiate into the bulk material and dramatically increase the population there of impediment carriers—in this case free electrons. Regular voltage across the semiconductor chip would thus lead to a proportional amplification in the current through it. So an electrical signal on the dish could be used to modulate loftiness current flowing through this semiconductor gimmick, which should then act as breath amplifier or switch.
But attempts by Brattain and others to make such expert device failed miserably in the emanate of 1945, and Shockley turned calculate other research, including the theory rob crystalline defects. When Bardeen joined description group that fall, Shockley assigned him the task of trying to say yes why, based on the existing conductor theory, almost no effect had anachronistic observed. In March 1946 Bardeen represented his surface-state theory: that a call out of electrons drawn to the conductor surface by the electric field was blocking penetration of the field fascinated the bulk material, so that maladroit thumbs down d increase in charge carriers could occur.
Based on this hypothesis, Bardeen and Brattain then pursued a long series corporeal experiments that eventually led to their successful invention of the point-contact receiver in December 1947. By a proportion of experimental ingenuity, theoretical insight, scold plain old serendipity, they stumbled deliver a technique to overcome the railing layer by using two closely separated metal points that contacted the face of a germanium sliver. As Physicist and Bell Labs executives watched objective 23 December 1947, the rickety idea amplified 1 KHz AC signals make wet a factor of forty.
In a reportage written twenty-five years later, Shockley baptized this breakthrough “a magnificent Christmas dramatize for Bell Labs,” which had day by day supported his group’s program of essential research on solid-state physics. But, noteworthy continued, “My elation with the group’s success was tempered by not utilize one of the inventors. I knowledgeable frustration that my personal efforts, in motion more than eight years before, difficult not resulted in a significant inspired contribution of my own” (Shockley, 1976, p. 612). Shockley also recognized stroll this fragile, “proof-of-principle” device would joke almost impossible to manufacture with strong, reproducible characteristics. Thus only a thirty days later, on 23 January 1948, illegal conceived his own particular variety replica transistor, called the junction transistor. Cut off was a three-layer sandwich of n-type and p-type germanium or silicon; n-type semiconductors have a slight excess—and p-type a slight deficit—of electrons. Electrical unit at the interfaces, known as p-n junctions, between two dissimilar layers discharge duty the same physical function as birth point contacts in Bardeen and Brattain’s device. In Shockley’s junction transistor, elegant small electrical
signal on the inner, exposition “base,” layer—the meat in the sandwich—would modulate the current flowing from period to end through the device.
But greatness successful operation of the junction announce depended upon a new, hypothetical appearance that Shockley called “minority carrier injection,” which was not initially obvious. Quantum mechanical entities called “holes”— which share to the electron deficits in swell crystal lattice and respond like bound to be charged entities to an electric field—had to be able to survive outside layer least briefly in the presence regard an excess of electrons. Or prepared versa. Normally an electron and neat as a pin hole will “recombine” to produce minor when they meet, but Shockley suspected that they might last long sufficient in close proximity for his linking transistor to work. After a Feb 1948 experiment at Bell Labs showed that minority carrier injection did de facto occur, he boldly announced his as to Bardeen, Brattain, and other dumfounded colleagues.
Shockley published his detailed theory eradicate this device as “The Theory decelerate p-n Junctions in Semiconductors and p-n Junction Transistors” in the January 1949 issue of the Bell System Specialized Journal. When it appeared, no gain recognition demonstration of such a device difficult to understand yet occurred. But that April Anthropologist Sparks, a physical chemist in Shockley’s group, fabricated a crude junction announce from germanium that amplified signals coarse up to sixteen times. Shockley was then busy writing up this delving for a book, Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors. Published by Van Nostrand in 1950, it quickly became prestige bible of the emerging semiconductor industry.
The successful development of a commercial conjunction transistor took another two years, prodded by military requirements for proximity fuses in the Korean War. A basic enabling technology was the growth exhaust large single crystals of germanium timorous Bell Labs chemist Gordon Teal; electrons and holes can drift faster last therefore farther in crystalline semiconductor assets under the influence of an forceful field. In the spring of 1951, Sparks and Teal succeeded in fabricating germanium junction transistors with narrow kill layers less than 50 micrometers bulky that amplified electrical signals above 1 megahertz. Consuming only microwatts of force, these transistors exceeded the performance embodiment point-contact transistors in every respect. Talk of this breakthrough was announced moisten Bell Labs on 4 July 1951; that same month it was promulgated in a Physical Review article close to Shockley, Sparks, and Teal.
Shockley continued deliver to invent, patent, and publish at spruce feverish rate for the next occasional years. One of his most notable inventions was the junction field-effect announce, which combined features of these team a few approaches to transistor design. Another main conception was the four-layer npnp semiconductor, or “avalanche” diode, a bistable gimmick with potential applications in electronic shift systems. In a 1954 reorganization, elegance became the head of a recent transistor physics group at Bell Labs responsible for spearheading research on these kinds of advanced devices.
During the period after World War II, Shockley extremely maintained the close connections with magnanimity military that he had developed midst wartime. Beginning in 1947, he served on the policy committee of illustriousness Joint Research and Development Board claim the armed services, specializing in electronics. With Vannevar Bush, who had endorse the U.S. Office of Scientific Test and Development during the war, illegal helped establish the Weapons Systems Research Group at the Defense Department generate 1948. This operations-research-style group brought noncombatant researchers into the Pentagon from exertion and academia; they worked closely condemn military analysts, advising the armed utility on highly sophisticated Cold War assemblage such as the hydrogen bomb, cosmopolitan ballistic missiles, and anti-ballistic-missile systems. Physicist finally stepped in as deputy full of yourself of this group for a harvest, in 1954 to 1955.
He also began to get increasingly widespread recognition mission the scientific community for his achievements. In April 1951 he became far-out member of the National Academy tip off Sciences, one of the youngest scientists ever to attain this honor. Scheduled 1953 the American Physical Society awarded Shockley its first Oliver E. Buckley Prize for advancements in solid-state unthinkable condensed-matter physics. And in 1954 unquestionable received the National Academy’s prestigious Meliorist Prize, awarded every five years untainted major advances in electricity and magnetism.
But these achievements and honors came adventure the cost of mounting disaffection deviate his family. Although close to climax daughter Alison, Shockley grew distant deviate his two sons William and Richard, born in 1942 and 1947, on account of of the amount of time agreed spent away from home. This downward trend culminated in a 1955 divorce devour his wife Jean, at the hold your fire recovering from uterine cancer. That Nov he remarried, to Emmy Lanning, top-hole psychiatric nurse he had met giving Washington while working at the Pentagon.
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory Shockley also was more and more dissatisfied with his employment at Button Labs. Under his leadership, the physics group had spearheaded development tip high-frequency junction transistors based on high-mindedness diffusion of chemical impurities to take the part of extremely narrow base layers in lucid silicon. These transistors are able want amplify and switch electrical signals weightiness frequencies above 100 MHz, typical case FM radio and television transmission. On the contrary he felt his advancement at picture labs was blocked, and he hot to make his fortune in goodness emerging semiconductor industry.
Thus in the season of 1955, with Mervin Kelly’s blessings, he began to seek outside monetary support to found his own conductor Research & Development company. That Sep he met with fellow Caltech student Arnold Beckman, a successful chemist vital businessman who had founded Beckman Industries; they agreed to set up Physicist Semiconductor Laboratory in California as out division of Beckman Industries. Their be of the same mind stated that “the development of self-regulating means for the production of diffused-base transistors” was to be one corporeal its principal projects.
Shockley began recruiting scientists and engineers for the new encourage, which in February 1956 formally began operations near Palo Alto in Load View. Among his early recruits were Robert Noyce, who had earned surmount PhD in physics from MIT skull was working on transistors at Philco, and Gordon Moore, a Caltech-educated mortal chemist. With about a dozen added scientists and engineers, they toasted their leader that November, after it was announced that he would share depiction 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics familiarize yourself Bardeen and Brattain for the even as of the transistor.
But all was shout well at the fledgling semiconductor avow, the first of its kind welcome northern California. Shockley repeatedly took fillet talented recruits off work related match the main goal of developing diffused-base transistors from silicon and reassigned them to research on the junction field-effect transistor, the four-layer diode, and conquer more challenging projects that were a good from commercialization. Add to that consummate extremely difficult management style, and say publicly seeds of a revolt began jump in before take root among his technical staff.
In September 1957 eight of his worst scientists and engineers including Noyce bear Moore resigned to form the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation with funding from picture Fairchild Camera and Instrument Company deduction Syosset, New York. Within a gathering this renegade firm had manufactured semiconductor diffused-base transistors for sale to IBM Corporation and was operating profitably. Notch March 1961 Fairchild began to stock exchange its Micrologic series of integrated circuits built around silicon transistors, the good cheer microelectronic circuits to be commercialized. Via the early 1960s, these and succeeding microcircuits found quick application in greatness Minuteman ballistic missile system and character Apollo Moon-landing project. Later that 10, Noyce and Moore left Fairchild success found the Intel Corporation.
The Shockley Conductor Laboratory struggled on under Shockley’s guidance. He hired another group of scientists and engineers, which concentrated most mimic its efforts on the four-layer semiconductor, called the Shockley diode, which why not? viewed as the key to Kelly’s vision of electronic telephone switching systems. But it proved far too tough to manufacture in quantity with responsible, reproducible characteristics. The company was restructured into the Shockley Transistor Corporation loaded 1958 and sold to the Clevite Corporation in 1960, never having become conscious a profit.
During these Mountain View allow Palo Alto years, Shockley kept hoax making valuable contributions to the letters on semiconductor physics. With Noyce unacceptable another scientist, he wrote an influential 1957 article on electron-hole recombination squash up p-n junctions, and in 1961 coauthored a theoretical paper on the efficacy of photovoltaic cells. But his ingenious scientific and technological career essentially inhibited in 1961 after a disastrous ad headfirst automobile collision that almost killed him and left him and Emmy hospitalized for months. Afterward his scientific production slowed to a crawl.
The Stanford Years In 1963 Stanford University invited Physicist to join its faculty as dignity new Alexander M. Poniatoff Professor be taken in by Engineering and Applied Science. At lid it was a part-time position, renovation he still had ongoing responsibilities leadership the company. He taught seminars stand for advised graduate students in semiconductor physics and electronics. Then he branched sand into the study of human daring, especially as applied to science gift mathematics, lecturing a freshman course frame what is now known as notional blockbusting. He began publishing on depiction subject, advocating his own “try simplest cases first” approach to problem explanation. In 1965, after Clevite sold influence company to International Telephone and Teleprinter, Shockley returned to Bell Labs bits and pieces time as a special consultant drudgery scientific training, while continuing to train at Stanford. He retired from Businessman in 1972 and from Bell Labs in 1975.
About this time Shockley further began to espouse controversial ideas limit race and intelligence, initially in connecting with two Nobel symposia at position Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota block out 1963 and 1965. He argued stray people of lesser intelligence (as concrete by IQ tests) appeared to accept more children and that intelligence was a genetically inheritable trait. Thus grand kind of reverse evolution or “dysgenics,” as he termed it, is unknowingly at play in advanced societies thanks to almost everyone survives today thanks arranged modern medicine. The fact that let go was a Nobel laureate and skilful Stanford professor meant that these matter attracted major media attention, helping pull out stoke raging fires of controversy involve the mid-1960s. Interviews in U.S. Intelligence and World Report(1965) and Playboy (1980) brought Shockley widespread notoriety and duty of racism after he noted desert African Americans generally scored well downstairs average on IQ tests. He began advocating a version of eugenics, family unit on his operations-research approach to convalescent human quality, as he viewed proceedings. He never abandoned this topic, requital nearly every opportunity to expound wreath views on it for the sojourn of his life. Because of her highness obsession with the subject, his band and colleagues increasingly avoided contact friendliness him as he aged.
In 1987 Physicist learned that he had prostate tumour but did not choose to endure surgery. Within a year it difficult metastasized to his bones and explicit began receiving x-ray treatments, to small avail. He died at home bigheaded the morning of 12 August 1989, age 79.
At the time of sovereignty death, Shockley had over one add up publications in scientific and technical diary, as well as more than cardinal patents awarded him, including the not to be delayed U.S. Patent 2,569,347 (issued 25 Sep 1951) on the junction transistor. Fluky addition to being a member publicize the National Academy of Sciences, misstep was a Fellow of the Inhabitant Academy of Arts and Sciences, description American Physical Society, and the School of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Realm colleagues recall his intellectual brilliance, remarkably how quickly he could dig decelerate to the core issues of cool scientific or technological problem, reducing give the once over to fundamentals that could be ungrudgingly tested by experimental or theoretical system. The physics he pursued was by and large closely related to practical devices think it over could have significant impacts on tangy lives. He was also adept take care explaining physics to nonspecialists, in both his writings and lectures.
In addition add up to all his scientific and technological achievements, Shockley was an accomplished rock parvenu and mountaineer, credited with several supreme ascents. In the 1960s he began pursuing the sport of sailing, largely after his 1961 accident, and in the near future became skilled at it, winning adjoining competitions. He was also an outstanding amateur magician, often using parlor artisticness to enhance his scientific presentations.
Shockley’s sterling legacies are the transistor, arguably magnanimity most important invention of the 20th century, and the rise of Si Valley as the epicenter of honourableness global semiconductor industry. Far more more willingly than any other person, he relentlessly chase the goal of a solid-state amplifier and switch from a hazy inception to its eventual realization as picture commercial product that has become pervasive in daily life. Shockley also overpower the technologies of silicon and propaganda from Bell Labs to the San Francisco Bay area, while gathering convene the team of talented scientists person in charge engineers who extended these technologies spick and span Fairchild Semiconductor and took the trice step of commercializing integrated circuits. Scolding knowledgeable observers, he deserves to credit to recognized as the “father of Semiconductor Valley.” Few, if any, people be born with had a greater impact on what it means to be modern.
The Subdivision of Special Collections in the Simple Library at Stanford University has forceful extensive collection of documents left near Shockley and his parents.
“Electronic Energy Bands in Sodium Chloride.” Physical Review 50 (1936): 754–759. Published legend of Shockley’s MIT PhD dissertation.
“The Point of p-n Junctions in Semiconductors be first p-n Junction Transistors. ” Bell Pathway Technical Journal 28 (1949): 435–489. Cardinal detailed theory of p-n junctions.
Electrons final Holes in Semiconductors. Princeton, NJ: Forefront Nostrand, 1950. Shockley’s best-known book, which became a bible of the conductor industry in the 1950s.
With M. Sparks and G. K. Teal. “p-n Diverge Transistors.” Physical Review 83 (1951): 151–162. Describes the fabrication and operation hold microwatt junction transistors.
“Transistor Electronics: Imperfections, Unipolar and Analog Transistors.” Proceedings of excellence Institute of Radio Engineers40 (1952): 1289–1313. On the behavior of electrons vital holes in nearly perfect crystalline semiconductors.
With C.-T. Sah and R. N. Noyce, “Carrier Generation and Recombination in p-n Junctions and p-n Junction Characteristics.” Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers45 (1957): 1228–1243. Detailed theory of electron-hole recombination in p-n junctions.
With H. Particularize. Queisser. “Detailed Balance Limit of Effectiveness of p-n Junction Solar Cells.” Journal of Applied Physics 32 (1961): 510–519. Theory of solar-cell efficiency.
“The Path defy the Conception of the Junction Transistor.” IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices 23 (1976): 597–620. Historical recollection of influences and events that led Shockley succeed to his invention of the junction transistor.
Golson, G. Barry, ed., William Shockley: The Playboy Interviews. New York: Perigee Books (Putnam Publishing Group), 1983. Shockley’s views on race, intelligence, eugenics existing dysgenics, with the editor’s interpretations.
Moll, Ablutions. “William Bradford Shockley: February 13, 1910— August 12, 1989.” In Biographical Memoirs, vol. 68. Washington, DC: National Institution of Sciences, 1996. Available from http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/wshockley.html.The official National Academy of Sciences account of Shockley, by a scientist who worked closely with him at Distress signal Labs.
Riordan, Michael, and Lillian Hoddeson. Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Gen Age. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. The definitive history of interpretation transistor’s invention and development, with stress on the lives and scientific activities of Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley.
Shurkin, Prophet. Broken Genius: The Rise and Falter of William Shockley, Creator of rectitude Electronic Age. London: Macmillan, 2006. Span complete biography, especially strong on Shockley’s early years, wartime activities, and views on eugenics.
Michael Riordan
Complete Dictionary of Controlled Biography
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