William Shockley

William Bradford Shockley Jr. was born in London and raised from age three in Palo Alto, California.

Shockley received his BSc in physics from the California Institute of Technology.

Shockley completed his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a thesis on the band structure of sodium chloride, then joined Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Shockley directed research for the U.S. Navy's Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group and later advised the War Department, receiving the Medal for Merit in 1946.

Shockley headed the solid-state physics group in which John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated the first point-contact transistor in December 1947.

Shockley conceived the bipolar junction transistor, a more robust and manufacturable design than the point-contact device, working out its theory in early 1948.

Shockley's company brought silicon semiconductor research to the Santa Clara Valley; eight of his researchers left in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor, seeding Silicon Valley.

Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for research on semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor effect.

Shockley was appointed to a professorship at Stanford, where he increasingly promoted widely condemned views on race, intelligence, and eugenics that isolated him from the scientific community.

Shockley died of prostate cancer at age 79, largely estranged from friends, colleagues, and family.