Shockley, William
Shockley, William (1910 - 1989) was an American physicist. He received the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the transistor, a tiny device that controls the flow of electric current in radios, television sets, computers, and almost every other kind of electronic equipment. Shockley shared the prize with two members of his research staff, the American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain.
In the early 1970's, Shockley's views on race and intelligence sparked much controversy. He claimed that heredity, rather than environment, was mainly responsible for whites generally scoring higher than blacks on intelligence tests. Most geneticists and psychologists disagreed with this theory.
William Bradford Shockley was born on Feb. 13, 1910, in London. His parents were Americans working in England. His father, William Hillman Shockley, was a mining engineer. His mother, May (Bradford) Shockley, was a mineral surveyor. The family returned to the United States in 1913 and lived in Palo Alto, California. Shock-ley's early interest in science was encouraged by his parents and by a neighbor who was a physics professor at nearby Stanford University. As a child, Shockley was first educated at home. He later attended Palo Alto Military Academy and then Hollywood High School, from which he graduated in 1927.
Shockley attended the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) for one year before transferring to the California Institute of Technology (often called Caltech) to study physics. He received a B.S. degree in physics from Caltech in 1932. He then obtained a teaching fellowship that allowed him to pursue graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Shockley received his Ph.D. degree in physics from MIT in 1936. His doctoral thesis, titled “Calculations of Wave Functions for Electrons in Sodium Chloride Crystals,” reflected his early research in solid-state physics.
After receiving his Ph.D. degree, Shockley went to work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. His first assignment involved the vacuum tube, a glass-encased component common in electronic equipment of the time. Vacuum tubes controlled the electric currents necessary to the operation of such equipment. Shockley's task was to develop a new kind of vacuum tube that would amplify (strengthen) electric current. Shockley began to experiment with solid-state semiconductors as alternatives to the expensive, fragile vacuum tubes. A semiconductor is a material that conducts electric current better than insulators like glass and wood but not as well as conductors like silver and copper. But in the late 1930's, not enough pure semiconductor materials, such as germanium or silicon, were available for Shockley to demonstrate his idea.
During World War II (1939-1945), Shockley and other Bell scientists became involved in military research. Shockley helped develop radar equipment. From 1942 to 1944, he served as research director of the U.S. Navy's Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group at Columbia University. He was a consultant for the U.S. secretary of war from 1944 to 1945.
After the war ended, Shockley returned to Bell Labs and resumed his research on semiconductors as director of the company's solid-state physics research program. His research team included Bardeen and Brattain. The group initially attempted to apply electric current across a semiconductor, but this attempt failed.
Bardeen suggested that some electrons were getting trapped in the material's surface layer, thus preventing the complete flow of electric current. This suggestion prompted them to study the surface effects of applied currents.
Electric current is a flow of electric charges. In a semiconductor, current is a flow of free electrons or a flow of holes. A free electron is an electron that is not tightly bound to an atom. A hole is a positively charged, “empty” region near an atom that would normally be occupied by an electron. An n-type semiconductor crystal has extra free electrons, and a p-type crystal has extra holes. The abbreviation n means negative, referring to the negative charge of the electrons in n-type materials. Similarly, the abbreviation p means positive, referring to the positive charge associated with holes in p-type materials.
In 1947, Bardeen and Brattain made the first successful amplifying semiconductor device. It was called a transistor, a shortened form of the term transfer resistor. This transistor, more specifically known as a point contact transistor, consisted of a piece of n-type germanium with two closely spaced gold contact points on one side and one tungsten contact point on the opposite side.
The discovery of the transistor was first announced at a press conference in New York City in the summer of 1948. It attracted little notice. Shockley continued to improve the design of the transistor. He wrote the book Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors, published in 1950, to describe his research team's work and to explain his theory for a new kind of transistor he called the junction transistor. By 1951, Shockley's coworkers sandwiched a thin layer of p-type germanium between two layers of n-type germanium. The places in this semiconductor crystal where the two types of material met were called p-n junctions. The regions on the two sides of a junction were doped (modified) in different ways to change the crystal's ability to conduct electric current. The transistor operated by controlling the current across two p-n junctions. This improved transistor worked much better than the earlier point contact transistor did.
The junction transistor revolutionized the electronics industry. It was soon used as a sound amplifier in hearing aids. The first portable transistor radio was introduced in 1954. In the mid-1950's, silicon began to replace germanium as the most commonly used semiconductor in transistors. Transistors became the main components built into computer chips, tiny devices that carry out computer programs and store programs and other data. Some chips no larger than a fingernail contain millions of transistors.
In 1955, Shockley left Bell Labs to form his own company, the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a subsidiary of Beckman Instruments, near Palo Alto. It became Shockley Transistor Corporation in 1958 and was incorporated into Clevite Transistor in 1960. Shockley left the company in 1963, and it went out of business in 1968.
From 1963 to 1975, Shockley was a professor of engineering and applied science at Stanford University. In 1966, he published the book Mechanics, written with Walter A. Gong. Shockley was named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1974. Over the course of his electronics career, he received more than 90 patents.
At Stanford, Shockley shifted his focus away from electronics research to concentrate on the study of human intelligence. Although he had no background or formal education in either the biological or the social sciences, Shockley attempted to conduct research in genetics. Genetics is the scientific study of heredity, the passing on of characteristics of living organisms from one generation to the next. Using data from IQ tests administered to soldiers by the U.S. Army, Shockley developed a theory about the relationship between intelligence and race. IQ (for intelligence quotient) tests use numbers to indicate a person's level of intelligence compared to other people.
In his theory, which he called dysgenics, Shock-ley claimed that blacks were genetically inferior to whites and that in people of mixed race, intelligence levels increase in proportion to the amount of “white blood” in a person's ancestry. In a lecture before the National Academy of Sciences, Shockley stated that the United States had a “Negro problem.” He claimed that “Negroes” were reproducing in greater numbers than “Caucasians” and thus lowering the average intelligence of the American population. He was sharply criticized by many other scientists for such views.
Shockley nevertheless continued to advance his theory of dysgenics. He published articles about his ideas, including a suggestion that people with low IQ's be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization so that they would not reproduce. He also donated samples of his sperm to be used for artificial insemination. At his speeches, Shockley often was interrupted by protesters.
In 1982, Shockley entered the Republican primary for a seat in the U.S. Senate. His campaign platform focused on his theory of dysgenics. He lost the election, finishing in eighth place.
Shockley died of prostate cancer on Aug. 12, 1989, in Palo Alto. In January 2000, he was named to the Consumer Electronics Association's Hall of Fame as a pioneer in the field.