William Shockley brought silicon to California, then drove his best people away
In 1956 William Shockley opened the first company working on silicon devices in what became Silicon Valley, staffed with brilliant recruits. Within about a year, eight of them quit over his domineering management and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. More than 65 later firms traced employee links back to that walkout, while his own company faded.
Shockley was born in London in 1910 to American parents and raised in Palo Alto from the age of three. His mother was the first woman to serve as a US deputy mining surveyor. Violent tantrums and his parents' dislike of public schools meant home schooling until eight. After Caltech he earned an MIT doctorate in 1936 and was among the first solid-state physicists hired by Bell Labs, which hoped semiconductors could replace the fragile vacuum tubes in its telephone network.
After the Second World War, during which he worked on anti-submarine tactics and radar bomb sights, he co-led a Bell Labs group seeking a solid-state amplifier. His idea of controlling a semiconductor with an external field kept failing until John Bardeen proposed that surface states were blocking it. Bardeen and Walter Brattain then built the point-contact transistor, and patent lawyers left Shockley's name off the applications, partly because Julius Lilienfeld had patented a field-effect design in the 1920s. Furious, Shockley secretly developed a sturdier layered junction transistor, first demonstrated in 1949 and announced in July 1951; that design dominated transistors into the 1960s. His 1950 book Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors became the field's reference.
All three men shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics, but Shockley had already alienated his colleagues. He effectively shut Bardeen and Brattain out of junction transistor work; Bardeen left Bell Labs in 1951 to pursue superconductivity, and Brattain refused to work with him again.
His biographer Joel Shurkin suggested he may have been the worst manager in electronics history. When a secretary suffered a minor cut, Shockley demanded lie detector tests to find a culprit. After the so-called traitorous eight resigned in late 1957, his company changed hands twice and closed after 1968. As a Stanford professor in later life he became notorious for promoting racism and eugenics. He died in 1989.
Source: William Shockley
