Biography of william b. shockley

(b. London, United Native land, 13 February 1910; d. Stanford, Calif., 12 August 1989), solid-state physics, merchandise of the transistor, operations research, eugenics.

Shockley was one of the most strange scientists of the twentieth century status a principal figure in establishing glory discipline of solid-state physics. Together upset John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, subside invented the transistor, sharing the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with them for this achievement. In particular, of course conceived the junction transistor, a solid-state amplifier and switch that was commercial during the 1950s and eventually loaded to the microelectronics revolution. In innovation the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Calif., he catalyzed the emergence of Element Valley as the epicenter of righteousness global semiconductor industry. As a University University professor during the last twosome decades of his life, he espoused controversial views on race and brains that brought him substantial public bring together and notoriety.

Early Years Shockley was indwelling in London on 13 February 1910, the only son of William Hillman Shockley, a Massachusetts Institute of Bailiwick (MIT)–educated mining engineer and consultant, limit Cora May Shockley (née Bradford), who had graduated from Stanford with hierarchy 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 pleasing Stanford. Young William was schooled lose ground home until he was eight, equate which he attended private grammar schools. A major influence during this put in writing was Perley Ross, a professor pattern physics at Stanford and a adjoin, who stimulated his interest in study. In 1923 the family moved adopt Hollywood, where he attended Hollywood Extreme School for the next four time eon, graduating in 1927. During his towering school years, he began to give your support to great proficiency in mathematics and branch of knowledge, especially physics.

After a year at honesty University of California, Southern Branch (now known as UCLA), Shockley transferred return 1928 to the new California League of Technology (Caltech) in nearby Metropolis. Under Nobel laureate Robert Millikan, Caltech was then becoming established as round off of the premier American institutions be proper of science and technology. There Shockley was exposed to the revolutionary ideas tactic quantum mechanics by such professors by the same token William Houston, Linus Pauling, and Richard Tolman. In 1932 he drove adapt to begin graduate study in physics at MIT, doing theoretical research refining solid-state physics under John Slater, give someone a buzz of the acknowledged founders of probity new discipline. In his PhD speech, submitted in early 1936, Shockley astute the energy-band structure of sodium chloride—the quantum-mechanical energy levels at which electrons can (or cannot) flow through capital crystal lattice of this compound. On the level was among the first attempts taint do such calculations for a yard rather than a chemical element.

As top-hole graduate student at MIT, Shockley difficult to understand met and married Jean Alberta Vocalist of Los Angeles while home nurse the summer of 1933. The consolidate had their first child, Alison, decency following year. In the summer follow 1936, the family relocated from Metropolis, Massachusetts, to New York City. Physicist began his first professional job present-day as a physicist at Bell Phone Laboratories, then located in Manhattan. Why not? had been hired by Bell Labs research director Mervin Kelly, who mincing him with the Bell System’s be in want of for some kind of solid-state change course to replace the slow, unreliable electromechanical switches then in wide use. Leadership key to Kelly’s ultimate vision virtuous electronic switching systems, this device became one of Shockley’s major research goals for the next quarter century. Blooper proposed at least two ideas get into such a device during the catch on five years, both based on grandeur compound semiconductor material copper oxide, on the other hand neither of them worked as significant had hoped.

As it did for nominal all U.S. physicists, the onset strain World War II interrupted Shockley’s digging. At first he worked on rad systems at Bell Labs and Concoction Electric, the manufacturing arm of mother company AT&T. But in the spokesperson of 1942 he was recruited give up Philip Morse (under whom he abstruse studied quantum mechanics at MIT) cause problems become the research director of interpretation U.S. Navy’s new Anti-Submarine Warfare Stump Research Group. Headquartered initially at University University, this team of scientists jaunt mathematicians applied probability, statistics, and wellorganized methods to the analysis and convalescence of military operations—in particular the seafaring campaign against German U-boats in grandeur Atlantic Ocean. Operations research and airborne radar systems effectively eliminated this presage by 1943. Following that, Shockley began working in Washington as a mutual consultant in the office of loftiness secretary of war. Using operations-research designs, he planned and implemented a experience program for B-29 crews employing prominence advanced short-wavelength, high-altitude radar bombing profile manufactured by Western Electric. The info proved so effective in the disintegration war against Japan that in Oct 1946 Shockley was awarded the Genetic Medal of Merit, the nation’s first civilian honor for wartime activities.

The Concoction of the Transistor In early 1945 Shockley returned part time to Phone Labs, which had moved to Lexicologist Hill, New Jersey, and began formation a solid-state physics research group. Conjectural physicists Walter Brattain and Gerald Pearson joined it at the outset; turn this way fall theorist John Bardeen was lured away from the University of Minnesota, where he had planned to send after war ended. Shockley also redux his prewar research on solid-state devices.

In April 1945 he conceived a solid-state switch based on the semiconductor reserves silicon and germanium; the technology heed these elements had advanced tremendously close to wartime radar research. In what enquiry now called a field-effect transistor, Physicist suggested that a strong electric offshoot applied by a metal plate unprejudiced above the semiconductor surface would permeate into the bulk material and dramatically increase the population there of load carriers—in this case free electrons. Dinky voltage across the semiconductor chip would thus lead to a proportional boost in the current through it. So an electrical signal on the layer could be used to modulate blue blood the gentry current flowing through this semiconductor contrivance, which should then act as be over amplifier or switch.

But attempts by Brattain and others to make such on the rocks device failed miserably in the hop of 1945, and Shockley turned pre-empt other research, including the theory imbursement crystalline defects. When Bardeen joined glory group that fall, Shockley assigned him the task of trying to lacking clarity why, based on the existing conductor theory, almost no effect had anachronistic observed. In March 1946 Bardeen prospect his surface-state theory: that a rank of electrons drawn to the conductor surface by the electric field was blocking penetration of the field behaviour the bulk material, so that pollex all thumbs butte increase in charge carriers could occur.

Based on this hypothesis, Bardeen and Brattain then pursued a long series holiday experiments that eventually led to their successful invention of the point-contact radio in December 1947. By a grouping of experimental ingenuity, theoretical insight, tube plain old serendipity, they stumbled send a technique to overcome the ha-ha layer by using two closely leaded metal points that contacted the put on sale of a germanium sliver. As Physicist and Bell Labs executives watched transference 23 December 1947, the rickety dodge amplified 1 KHz AC signals get ahead of a factor of forty.

In a life story written twenty-five years later, Shockley entitled this breakthrough “a magnificent Christmas existent for Bell Labs,” which had unswervingly supported his group’s program of elementary research on solid-state physics. But, filth continued, “My elation with the group’s success was tempered by not utilize one of the inventors. I proficient frustration that my personal efforts, in operation more than eight years before, abstruse not resulted in a significant bright contribution of my own” (Shockley, 1976, p. 612). Shockley also recognized defer this fragile, “proof-of-principle” device would continue almost impossible to manufacture with fixed, reproducible characteristics. Thus only a thirty days later, on 23 January 1948, fiasco conceived his own particular variety describe transistor, called the junction transistor. Euphoria 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 achievement at the interfaces, known as p-n junctions, between two dissimilar layers meet the same physical function as grandeur point contacts in Bardeen and Brattain’s device. In Shockley’s junction transistor, uncut small electrical

signal on the inner, gaffe “base,” layer—the meat in the sandwich—would modulate the current flowing from stop to end through the device.

But rendering successful operation of the junction tranny depended upon a new, hypothetical operation that Shockley called “minority carrier injection,” which was not initially obvious. Quantum mechanical entities called “holes”— which agree to the electron deficits in clean crystal lattice and respond like unquestionable charged entities to an electric field—had to be able to survive whack least briefly in the presence show consideration for an excess of electrons. Or degradation versa. Normally an electron and dialect trig hole will “recombine” to produce make inroads when they meet, but Shockley imagined that they might last long too little in close proximity for his branch transistor to work. After a Feb 1948 experiment at Bell Labs showed that minority carrier injection did unbelievably occur, he boldly announced his whilst to Bardeen, Brattain, and other stunned colleagues.

Shockley published his detailed theory show consideration for this device as “The Theory ticking off p-n Junctions in Semiconductors and p-n Junction Transistors” in the January 1949 issue of the Bell System Mechanical Journal. When it appeared, no make your mark demonstration of such a device difficult yet occurred. But that April Biologist Sparks, a physical chemist in Shockley’s group, fabricated a crude junction tranny from germanium that amplified signals impervious to up to sixteen times. Shockley was then busy writing up this trial for a book, Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors. Published by Van Nostrand in 1950, it quickly became glory 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 pivotal enabling technology was the growth eradicate large single crystals of germanium stop Bell Labs chemist Gordon Teal; electrons and holes can drift faster sit therefore farther in crystalline semiconductor money under the influence of an dynamic field. In the spring of 1951, Sparks and Teal succeeded in fabricating germanium junction transistors with narrow example layers less than 50 micrometers coagulated that amplified electrical signals above 1 megahertz. Consuming only microwatts of command, these transistors exceeded the performance get ahead point-contact transistors in every respect. Word of this breakthrough was announced timorous Bell Labs on 4 July 1951; that same month it was accessible in a Physical Review article encourage Shockley, Sparks, and Teal.

Shockley continued outline invent, patent, and publish at spiffy tidy up feverish rate for the next embargo years. One of his most notable inventions was the junction field-effect disseminate, which combined features of these deuce approaches to transistor design. Another mark off conception was the four-layer npnp tube, or “avalanche” diode, a bistable madden with potential applications in electronic replacing systems. In a 1954 reorganization, inaccuracy became the head of a different transistor physics group at Bell Labs responsible for spearheading research on these kinds of advanced devices.

During the dec after World War II, Shockley besides maintained the close connections with excellence military that he had developed lasting wartime. Beginning in 1947, he served on the policy committee of nobility Joint Research and Development Board be totally convinced by the armed services, specializing in electronics. With Vannevar Bush, who had agree the U.S. Office of Scientific Investigating and Development during the war, powder helped establish the Weapons Systems Estimation Group at the Defense Department copy 1948. This operations-research-style group brought nonbelligerent researchers into the Pentagon from exertion and academia; they worked closely barter military analysts, advising the armed utility on highly sophisticated Cold War aggregation such as the hydrogen bomb, international ballistic missiles, and anti-ballistic-missile systems. Physicist finally stepped in as deputy governor of this group for a generation, in 1954 to 1955.

He also began to get increasingly widespread recognition remove the scientific community for his achievements. In April 1951 he became uncut member of the National Academy cataclysm Sciences, one of the youngest scientists ever to attain this honor. Modern 1953 the American Physical Society awarded Shockley its first Oliver E. Buckley Prize for advancements in solid-state forward condensed-matter physics. And in 1954 smartness received the National Academy’s prestigious Reformist Prize, awarded every five years sponsor major advances in electricity and magnetism.

But these achievements and honors came finish off the cost of mounting disaffection newcomer disabuse of his family. Although close to fillet daughter Alison, Shockley grew distant superior his two sons William and Richard, born in 1942 and 1947, thanks to of the amount of time pacify spent away from home. This downward trend culminated in a 1955 divorce overrun his wife Jean, at the sicken recovering from uterine cancer. That Nov he remarried, to Emmy Lanning, unadulterated psychiatric nurse he had met observe Washington while working at the Pentagon.

Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory Shockley also was more and more dissatisfied with his employment at Sound Labs. Under his leadership, the portable radio physics group had spearheaded development hook high-frequency junction transistors based on position diffusion of chemical impurities to crumb extremely narrow base layers in polycrystalline silicon. These transistors are able deal amplify and switch electrical signals enraged frequencies above 100 MHz, typical contact FM radio and television transmission. On the other hand he felt his advancement at goodness labs was blocked, and he required to make his fortune in influence emerging semiconductor industry.

Thus in the season of 1955, with Mervin Kelly’s blessings, he began to seek outside fiscal support to found his own conductor Research & Development company. That Sept he met with fellow Caltech scholar Arnold Beckman, a successful chemist come to rest businessman who had founded Beckman Industries; they agreed to set up Physicist Semiconductor Laboratory in California as systematic division of Beckman Industries. Their allocation stated that “the development of selfregulating means for the production of diffused-base transistors” was to be one honor its principal projects.

Shockley began recruiting scientists and engineers for the new certain, which in February 1956 formally began operations near Palo Alto in Deal View. Among his early recruits were Robert Noyce, who had earned government PhD in physics from MIT subject was working on transistors at Philco, and Gordon Moore, a Caltech-educated worldly chemist. With about a dozen in the opposite direction scientists and engineers, they toasted their leader that November, after it was announced that he would share depiction 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics inspect Bardeen and Brattain for the whilst of the transistor.

But all was keen well at the fledgling semiconductor unchangeable, the first of its kind interject northern California. Shockley repeatedly took enthrone talented recruits off work related enhance 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 burden more challenging projects that were off from commercialization. Add to that tiara extremely difficult management style, and magnanimity seeds of a revolt began take home take root among his technical staff.

In September 1957 eight of his appropriately scientists and engineers including Noyce flourishing Moore resigned to form the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation with funding from honesty Fairchild Camera and Instrument Company confiscate Syosset, New York. Within a generation this renegade firm had manufactured semiconductor diffused-base transistors for sale to IBM Corporation and was operating profitably. Case March 1961 Fairchild began to hawk its Micrologic series of integrated circuits built around silicon transistors, the cardinal microelectronic circuits to be commercialized. Next to the early 1960s, these and succeeding microcircuits found quick application in distinction Minuteman ballistic missile system and goodness Apollo Moon-landing project. Later that period, Noyce and Moore left Fairchild choose 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 present its efforts on the four-layer tube, called the Shockley diode, which proceed viewed as the key to Kelly’s vision of electronic telephone switching systems. But it proved far too drizzly to manufacture in quantity with responsible, reproducible characteristics. The company was reorganised into the Shockley Transistor Corporation suspend 1958 and sold to the Clevite Corporation in 1960, never having present a profit.

During these Mountain View plus Palo Alto years, Shockley kept valuation making valuable contributions to the facts on semiconductor physics. With Noyce limit another scientist, he wrote an have a bearing 1957 article on electron-hole recombination bear p-n junctions, and in 1961 coauthored a theoretical paper on the talent of photovoltaic cells. But his quick-witted scientific and technological career essentially overstuffed in 1961 after a disastrous frontal automobile collision that almost killed him and left him and Emmy hospitalized for months. Afterward his scientific fruitfulness slowed to a crawl.

The Stanford Years In 1963 Stanford University invited Physicist to join its faculty as integrity new Alexander M. Poniatoff Professor confiscate Engineering and Applied Science. At cap it was a part-time position, whilst he still had ongoing responsibilities control the company. He taught seminars build up advised graduate students in semiconductor physics and electronics. Then he branched proceed into the study of human power, especially as applied to science stake mathematics, lecturing a freshman course go through with a finetooth comb what is now known as ideal blockbusting. He began publishing on representation subject, advocating his own “try simplest cases first” approach to problem explanation. In 1965, after Clevite sold nobleness company to International Telephone and Wire, Shockley returned to Bell Labs debris time as a special consultant exercise scientific training, while continuing to advise at Stanford. He retired from Businessman in 1972 and from Bell Labs in 1975.

About this time Shockley further began to espouse controversial ideas correctly race and intelligence, initially in union with two Nobel symposia at integrity Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota invite 1963 and 1965. He argued think about it people of lesser intelligence (as inflexible by IQ tests) appeared to keep more children and that intelligence was a genetically inheritable trait. Thus deft kind of reverse evolution or “dysgenics,” as he termed it, is off one\'s guard at play in advanced societies now almost everyone survives today thanks design modern medicine. The fact that forbidden was a Nobel laureate and smart Stanford professor meant that these materials attracted major media attention, helping enhance stoke raging fires of controversy tag the mid-1960s. Interviews in U.S. Counsel and World Report(1965) and Playboy (1980) brought Shockley widespread notoriety and levy of racism after he noted think about it African Americans generally scored well beneath average on IQ tests. He began advocating a version of eugenics, homeproduced on his operations-research approach to up human quality, as he viewed stream. He never abandoned this topic, break weighing down on nearly every opportunity to expound views on it for the family circle of his life. Because of dominion obsession with the subject, his crowd and colleagues increasingly avoided contact surrender him as he aged.

In 1987 Physicist learned that he had prostate somebody but did not choose to suffer surgery. Within a year it confidential metastasized to his bones and let go began receiving x-ray treatments, to slender avail. He died at home friendship the morning of 12 August 1989, age 79.

At the time of rulership death, Shockley had over one multitude publications in scientific and technical reminiscences annals, as well as more than cardinal patents awarded him, including the significant U.S. Patent 2,569,347 (issued 25 Sep 1951) on the junction transistor. Slight addition to being a member appropriate the National Academy of Sciences, earth was a Fellow of the Dweller Academy of Arts and Sciences, prestige American Physical Society, and the Guild of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. King colleagues recall his intellectual brilliance, exceptionally how quickly he could dig place to the core issues of straighten up scientific or technological problem, reducing clever to fundamentals that could be gladly tested by experimental or theoretical agency. The physics he pursued was commonly closely related to practical devices mosey could have significant impacts on oration lives. He was also adept presume explaining physics to nonspecialists, in both his writings and lectures.

In addition top all his scientific and technological achievements, Shockley was an accomplished rock adventurer and mountaineer, credited with several rule ascents. In the 1960s he began pursuing the sport of sailing, enormously after his 1961 accident, and erelong became skilled at it, winning regional competitions. He was also an superb amateur magician, often using parlor astuteness wiles to enhance his scientific presentations.

Shockley’s unchanging legacies are the transistor, arguably loftiness most important invention of the ordinal century, and the rise of Si Valley as the epicenter of prestige global semiconductor industry. Far more amaze any other person, he relentlessly track the goal of a solid-state amplifier and switch from a hazy beginning to its eventual realization as representation commercial product that has become international in daily life. Shockley also paralyse the technologies of silicon and dispersal from Bell Labs to the San Francisco Bay area, while gathering produce the team of talented scientists soar engineers who extended these technologies recoil Fairchild Semiconductor and took the following step of commercializing integrated circuits. Cheerfulness knowledgeable observers, he deserves to cast doubt on recognized as the “father of Semiconductor Valley.” Few, if any, people be blessed with had a greater impact on what it means to be modern.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Offshoot of Special Collections in the Verdant Library at Stanford University has untainted extensive collection of documents left antisocial Shockley and his parents.

WORKS BY SHOCKLEY

“Electronic Energy Bands in Sodium Chloride.” Physical Review 50 (1936): 754–759. Published incarnation of Shockley’s MIT PhD dissertation.

“The Speculation of p-n Junctions in Semiconductors take precedence p-n Junction Transistors. ” Bell Group Technical Journal 28 (1949): 435–489. Rule detailed theory of p-n junctions.

Electrons added Holes in Semiconductors. Princeton, NJ: Camper 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 Divergence Transistors.” Physical Review 83 (1951): 151–162. Describes the fabrication and operation addendum microwatt junction transistors.

“Transistor Electronics: Imperfections, Unipolar and Analog Transistors.” Proceedings of picture Institute of Radio Engineers40 (1952): 1289–1313. On the behavior of electrons dominant 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. Document. Queisser. “Detailed Balance Limit of Adeptness of p-n Junction Solar Cells.” Journal of Applied Physics 32 (1961): 510–519. Theory of solar-cell efficiency.

“The Path inhibit the Conception of the Junction Transistor.” IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices 23 (1976): 597–620. Historical recollection of influences and events that led Shockley finish with his invention of the junction transistor.

OTHER SOURCES

Golson, G. Barry, ed., William Shockley: The Playboy Interviews. New York: Perigee Books (Putnam Publishing Group), 1983. Shockley’s views on race, intelligence, eugenics take dysgenics, with the editor’s interpretations.

Moll, Toilet. “William Bradford Shockley: February 13, 1910— August 12, 1989.” In Biographical Memoirs, vol. 68. Washington, DC: National School of Sciences, 1996. Available from http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/wshockley.html.The official National Academy of Sciences history of Shockley, by a scientist who worked closely with him at Campana Labs.

Riordan, Michael, and Lillian Hoddeson. Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Document Age. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. The definitive history of greatness transistor’s invention and development, with prominence on the lives and scientific activities of Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley.

Shurkin, Prophet. Broken Genius: The Rise and Misery of William Shockley, Creator of interpretation Electronic Age. London: Macmillan, 2006. A- complete biography, especially strong on Shockley’s early years, wartime activities, and views on eugenics.

Michael Riordan