Biography of william shockley biografia corta

With about a dozen other scientists and engineers, they toasted their leader that November, after it was announced that he would share the Nobel Prize in Physics with Bardeen and Brattain for the invention of the transistor. But all was not well at the fledgling semiconductor firm, the first of its kind in northern California. Shockley repeatedly took his talented recruits off work related to 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 other more challenging projects that were far from commercialization.

Add to that his extremely difficult management style, and the seeds of a revolt began to take root among his technical staff. Within a year this renegade firm had manufactured silicon diffused-base transistors for sale to IBM Corporation and was operating profitably. In March Fairchild began to market its Micrologic series of integrated circuits built around silicon transistors, the first microelectronic circuits to be commercialized.

During the early s, these and successive microcircuits found quick application in the Minuteman ballistic missile system and the Apollo Moon-landing project. But it proved far too difficult to manufacture in quantity with reliable, reproducible characteristics. The company was reorganized into the Shockley Transistor Corporation in and sold to the Clevite Corporation in , never having realized a profit.

During these Mountain View and Palo Alto years, Shockley kept on making valuable contributions to the literature on semiconductor physics. With Noyce and another scientist, he wrote an important article on electron-hole recombination in p-n junctions, and in coauthored a theoretical paper on the efficiency of photovoltaic cells. But his creative scientific and technological career essentially ended in after a disastrous head-on automobile collision that almost killed him and left him and Emmy hospitalized for months.

Afterward his scientific productivity slowed to a crawl. Poniatoff Professor of Engineering and Applied Science. At first it was a part-time position, as he still had ongoing responsibilities directing the company. He taught seminars and advised graduate students in semiconductor physics and electronics. Then he branched out into the study of human creativity, especially as applied to science and mathematics, lecturing a freshman course on what is now known as conceptual blockbusting.

In , after Clevite sold the company to International Telephone and Telegraph, Shockley returned to Bell Labs part time as a special consultant on scientific training, while continuing to teach at Stanford. He retired from Stanford in and from Bell Labs in About this time Shockley also began to espouse controversial ideas on race and intelligence, initially in connection with two Nobel symposia at the Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota in and He argued that people of lesser intelligence as determined by IQ tests appeared to have more children and that intelligence was a genetically inheritable trait.

The fact that he was a Nobel laureate and a Stanford professor meant that these observations attracted major media attention, helping to stoke raging fires of controversy in the mids. Interviews in U. News and World Report and Playboy brought Shockley widespread notoriety and charges of racism after he noted that African Americans generally scored well below average on IQ tests.

He began advocating a version of eugenics, based on his operations-research approach to improving human quality, as he viewed it. He never abandoned this topic, pursuing nearly every opportunity to expound his views on it for the rest of his life. Because of his obsession with the subject, his friends and colleagues increasingly avoided contact with him as he aged.

In Shockley learned that he had prostate cancer but did not choose to undergo surgery. Within a year it had metastasized to his bones and he began receiving x-ray treatments, to little avail. He died at home on the morning of 12 August , age At the time of his death, Shockley had over one hundred publications in scientific and technical journals, as well as more than ninety patents awarded him, including the crucial U.

Patent 2,, issued 25 September on the junction transistor. His colleagues recall his intellectual brilliance, especially how quickly he could dig down to the core issues of a scientific or technological problem, reducing it to fundamentals that could be readily tested by experimental or theoretical means. The physics he pursued was usually closely related to practical devices that could have significant impacts on our lives.

He was also adept at explaining physics to nonspecialists, in both his writings and lectures. In addition to all his scientific and technological achievements, Shockley was an accomplished rock climber and mountaineer, credited with several first ascents. In the s he began pursuing the sport of sailing, especially after his accident, and soon became skilled at it, winning local competitions.

He was also an excellent amateur magician, often using parlor tricks to enhance his scientific presentations. Far more than any other person, he relentlessly pursued the goal of a solid-state amplifier and switch from a hazy conception to its eventual realization as the commercial product that has become ubiquitous in daily life. Shockley also brought the technologies of silicon and diffusion from Bell Labs to the San Francisco Bay area, while gathering together the team of talented scientists and engineers who extended these technologies at Fairchild Semiconductor and took the next step of commercializing integrated circuits.

The Department of Special Collections in the Green Library at Stanford University has an extensive collection of documents left by Shockley and his parents. First detailed theory of p-n junctions. Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, With M. Sparks and G. Describes the fabrication and operation of microwatt junction transistors.

On the behavior of electrons and holes in nearly perfect crystalline semiconductors. With C. Sah and R. Detailed theory of electron-hole recombination in p-n junctions. With H. Theory of solar-cell efficiency. Historical recollection of influences and events that led Shockley to his invention of the junction transistor. Golson, G. Barry, ed. Moll, John.

The official National Academy of Sciences biography of Shockley, by a scientist who worked closely with him at Bell Labs. Riordan, Michael, and Lillian Hoddeson. New York: W. Norton, Shurkin, Joel. London: Macmillan, Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia.

Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Physicist William Shockley shared the Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the transistor. Though Shockley would correct the record where reporters gave him sole credit for the invention, [ 37 ] he eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor.

Bardeen began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in Brattain refused to work with Shockley further and was assigned to another group. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain had much to do with the development of the transistor beyond the first year after its invention. Shockley left Bell Labs around and took a job at Caltech.

Shockley recruited brilliant employees to his company, but alienated them by undermining them relentlessly. 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 to reminisce about their time with Shockley, "the man who brought silicon to Silicon Valley", as the group's organizer said in After Shockley left his role as director of Shockley Semiconductor, he joined Stanford University, where he was appointed the Alexander M.

Poniatoff Professor of Engineering and Applied Science in , a position which he held until he retired as a professor emeritus in 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. 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.

Buckley Jr. 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. Epps argued that "William Shockley's position lends itself to racist interpretations". Shockley insisted that he was not a racist. Shockley's advocacy of eugenics triggered protests.

In one incident, the science society Sigma Xi , fearing violence, canceled a convocation in Brooklyn where Shockley was scheduled to speak. In Atlanta in , Shockley filed a libel suit against the Atlanta Constitution after a science writer, Roger Witherspoon , compared Shockley's advocacy of a voluntary sterilization program to Nazi human experimentation.

The suit took three years to go to trial. Shockley won the suit but he only received one dollar in damages [ 58 ] and he did not receive any punitive damages. Shockley's biographer Joel Shurkin, a science writer on the staff of Stanford University during those years, sums this statement up by saying that it was defamatory, but Shockley's reputation was not worth much by the time the trial reached a verdict.

At one point, he toyed with the idea of making the reporters take a simple quiz on his work before he would discuss the subject matter of it with them. His habit of saving all of his papers including laundry lists provides abundant documentation on his life for researchers. Shockley was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the United States Senate election in California.

He ran on a single-issue platform of opposing the "dysgenic threat" that he alleged African-Americans and other groups posed. Almost no one wanted to be associated with him, and many of those who were willing did him more harm than good". Travis Osborne , a member. The organization was founded according to its mission "solely for scientific and educational purposes related to human population and quality problems".

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. At age 23 and while still a student, Shockley married Jean Bailey in August The couple had two sons and a daughter. Shockley was an accomplished rock climber, going often to the Shawangunks in the Hudson River Valley.

His route across an overhang, known as "Shockley's Ceiling", is one of the classic climbing routes in the area. He once "magically" produced a bouquet of roses at the end of his address before the American Physical Society. He was also known in his early years for elaborate practical jokes. 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. According to PBS , Shockley was cruel towards his children and unhappy in his life. He reportedly tried playing Russian roulette as part of an attempted suicide.

Shockley died of prostate cancer in at the age of His children reportedly learned of his death by reading his obituary in the newspaper. Shockley was granted over ninety US patents. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item.

American physicist, inventor, and eugenicist — For other uses, see William Shockley disambiguation. London , England. Stanford, California , U. Early life and education [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. Development of the transistor [ edit ]. Shockley Semiconductor [ edit ]. Main article: Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.

Biography of william shockley biografia corta

Racist and eugenicist views [ edit ]. See also: History of the race and intelligence controversy. Foundation for Research and Education on Eugenics and Dysgenics [ edit ]. Personal life [ edit ]. Death [ edit ]. Honors [ edit ]. Patents [ edit ]. Bibliography [ edit ]. There is no evidence that his estimates were circulated at upper levels in the Truman administration or influenced the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

After the war, Shockley returned to Bell Labs, where the mandate was to find solid-state alternatives to cumbersome vacuum-tube amplifiers. Shockley proposed using an external electrical field on a semiconductor to affect its conductivity. He worked on a team that included John Bardeen , a theoretician whose insights enabled them to overcome early failures, and Walter Brattain , a brilliant and gifted experimentalist.

Bardeen , Brattain and Shockley had a falling-out over the credit for the invention. He maneuvered unsuccessfully to have his name alone on the patent. He would eventually garner 90 patents under his name. When he, Bardeen and Brattain jointly received the Nobel Prize in , they reconciled. In , Shockley was named director of transistor physics research at Bell, but left Bell Laboratories in to join Beckman Instruments, Inc.

The firm was the first to work with silicon as a semiconductor. In , Shockley renewed his association with Bell Telephone Laboratories in the capacity of executive consultant. He retired from this position in February After winning the Noble Prize in physics and developing his own start up company, Shockley was considered a leading international figure within the scientific community.

However, things took a controversial turn in his career; in , Shockley attended a Nobel conference and gave his infamous speech: "Genetics and the Future of Man. In , he embarked on a new career as a eugenics researchers and advocate. Provocatively, he suggested that this dysgenic effect was more pronounced among African Americans, even if the initial genetic starting point had been the same a point that he did not necessarily concede.

His outspokenness gained him a reputation as a crank and a racist, though he continued to characterize himself as a true liberal in his pursuit of factual truth. His efforts got the attention of Harry Weyher, the president of the Pioneer Fund. At the age of three, Shockley moved with his family to Palo Alto, California, where he spent his childhood.

Shockley showed signs of both intellectual brilliance and mental instability from a young age. He experienced unpredictable fits of aggression, which escalated over time. Despite these challenges, he excelled academically. At the age of eight, Shockley enrolled in a military academy in Palo Alto, which had a positive impact on his behavior.

On May 26, , Shockley's father passed away, leaving the family with sufficient means to live comfortably. Shockley Jr. Shockley went on to earn his Ph. After completing his Ph.