William Shockley
1910–1989, London, England, Stanford, California
American physicist who led the semiconductor group at Bell Labs, co-invented the transistor, and won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Born in London to American parents, Shockley studied at Caltech and earned his doctorate at MIT before joining Bell Labs in 1936. After the Second World War he led the semiconductor group where John Bardeen and Walter Brattain built the first point-contact transistor, while Shockley himself developed p–n junction theory and invented the junction transistor.
In 1955 he left Bell to found Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View — the seed of Silicon Valley. His key engineers defected to form Fairchild and later Intel. In later life he taught at Stanford and became notorious for controversial claims about eugenics and race.
Nobel-winning work
At Bell Labs, Shockley led the semiconductor group studying field effects in germanium; when his initial field-effect transistor idea failed, Bardeen and Brattain pursued surface effects and on 23 December 1947 demonstrated the transistor effect with a point-contact device that amplified signals.
Shockley himself developed the full theory of p–n junctions and designed the junction transistor — published 1948–1949 in Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors — the practical form that made the transistor the foundation of all modern electronics. The 1956 Nobel Prize went to the trio 'for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect'.
Workplaces: Bell Labs, Stanford University
United States, United Kingdom