Life of Shockley William Bradford And His Contribution to The World of Science (1910 – 1989)
William Bradford Shockley was an American physicist and eugenicist who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for their research on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.[1]
He was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain.
As a result of Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s, California's Silicon Valley became a hotbed of electronic innovation. He recruited brilliant employees but quickly alienated them with his autocratic and erratic management. They left and found companies in the industry. [2]
In his later life, while a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and afterward, Shockley became widely known for his racist views and advocacy of eugenics. [6][7][8]
Shockley William Bradford
Early life:
Education:
- Because of Shockley's habit of violent tantrums and his parents' dislike of public schools, they homeschooled Shockley until the age of eight. [7]
- Shockley learned some physics at a young age from a neighbor who was a Stanford physics professor. [11]
- Shockley spent two years at Palo Alto Military Academy, then briefly enrolled in the Los Angeles Coaching School to study physics, and later graduated from Hollywood High School in 1927. [12][13]
- Shockley earned his Bachelor of Science degree from Caltech in 1932
- PhD from MIT in 1936. The title of his doctoral thesis was Electronic Bands in Sodium Chloride, a topic suggested by his thesis advisor, John C. Slater. [14]
Career:
Shockley was one of the first recruits to Bell Labs by Mervin Kelly. Shockley joined a group headed by Clinton Davisson in Murray Hill, New Jersey. [16] Executives at Bell Labs had theorized that semiconductors might offer solid-state alternatives to the vacuum tubes used throughout Bell's nationwide telephone system. Shockley conceived several designs based on copper-oxide semiconductors and, with Walter Brattain, unsuccessfully attempted to create a prototype in 1939. [15]
- Shockley published several fundamental papers on solid-state physics in Physical Review. In 1938, he received his first patent, an Electron Discharge Device on electron multipliers. [17]
When World War II broke out, Shockley's prior research was interrupted.
- He became involved in radar research in Manhattan (New York City).
- In May 1942 he took leave from Bell Labs to become a research director at Columbia University's Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Group. [18]
- In 1944, he organized a training program for B-29 bomber pilots to use new radar bomb sights.
- In late 1944, he took a three-month tour to the bases around to assess the results.
- In July 1945, the War Department asked Shockley to prepare a report on the question of probable casualties from an invasion of the Japanese mainland.
Secretary of War Robert Patterson awarded Shockley the Medal for Merit on October 17, 1946, for the work on this project. [20]
His report influenced the decision of the United States to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Which led to the surrender of Japan. [22]
Shockley was the first physicist to propose a log-normal distribution to model the creation process for scientific research papers. [23]
Development of the transistor:
Shortly after the war ended in 1945, Bell Labs formed a team of experts to seek a solid-state alternative to fragile glass vacuum tube amplifiers. The first attempt was Shockley's idea about using an external electrical field on a semiconductor to affect its conductivity. These experiments failed every time in all sorts of configurations and materials. The group was at a standstill until Bardeen suggested a theory that invoked surface states that prevented the field from penetrating the semiconductor. The group changed its focus to study these surface states.
- By the winter of 1946, they had enough results that one of the team members (Bardeen) submitted a paper on the surface states to Physical Review.
- The pace of the work picked up significantly when they started to surround point contacts between the semiconductor and the conducting wires with electrolytes.
- Finally, they began to get some evidence of power amplification when applying a voltage across a p–n junction. [25]
Bell Labs' attorneys soon discovered that devices based on Shockley's field-effect principle were patented in 1930 by Julius Lilienfeld, who filed his MESFET-like patent in Canada on October 22, 1925. [26][27]
In 1930, Shockley, angered by not being included in the patent applications, secretly continued his work to build a different sort of transistor based on junctions instead of point contacts.
- A few months later, he invented a considerably more robust transistor with a layer or 'sandwich' structure. This structure evolved into the bipolar junction transistor.
- In 1949, Shockley worked out a complete description of what he called the "sandwich" transistor.
- Meanwhile, Shockley worked on his magnum opus, Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors, and published it as a 558-page treatise in 1950.
The tome included Shockley's critical ideas of drift and diffusion and the differential equations that govern the flow of electrons in solid-state crystals. The book described Shockley's diode equation. This seminal work became the reference text for other scientists working to develop and improve new variants of the transistor and other devices based on semiconductors.
- It resulted in the invention of the bipolar junction transistor in 1951.
The ensuing publicity generated by the "invention of the transistor" often thrust Shockley to the fore, much to the chagrin of Bardeen and Brattain. Bell Labs management, however, consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Shockley would correct the record when reporters gave him sole credit for the invention. However, he eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, essentially blocking the two from working on the junction transistor. Bardeen began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951. Brattain refused to work with Shockley further and joined another group. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain had much to do with the development of the transistor beyond the first year after its invention.
- Shockley left Bell Labs around 1953 and took a job at Caltech.
- Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. [1]
Shockley received the following awards and honors for his contribution:
· Elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1951.
· Two years later, he received the prestigious Comstock Prize for Physics, as well as many other awards and honors.
· He held two visiting lectureships: In 1946, at Princeton University, In 1954, at the California Institute of Technology.
· For one year (1954-1955), he was the Deputy Director and Research Director of the Weapons System Evaluation Group in the Defence Department.
Shockley Semiconductor:
- In 1956, Shockley started Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California. [39][40]
- Shockley recruited brilliant employees to his company but alienated them by undermining them relentlessly. [2][41]
- He may have been the worst manager in the history of electronics, according to his biographer Joel Shurkin. [41][2]
- Shockley was autocratic, dominating, erratic, hard to please, and increasingly paranoid. [42]
Racist and eugenicist views:
- After Shockley left his role as director of Shockley Semiconductor, he joined Stanford University as the first Alexander M. Poniatoff Professor of Engineering Science in 1963.
- He held this position until he retired as a professor emeritus in 1975.
In the last two decades of his life, Shockley, who had no degree in genetics, became widely known for his extreme views on race and human intelligence and his advocacy of eugenics. [3][6] He thought his work was important to the future of humanity, and he also described it as the most important aspect of his career. He argued that a higher reproduction rate among purportedly less intelligent people caused a dysgenic effect and argued a drop in average intelligence would lead to a decline in civilization.
- He also claimed that black people were genetically and intellectually inferior to white people. [3] Shockley's biographer Joel Shurkin notes that for much of Shockley's life in the racially segregated United States of the time, he had almost no contact with black people. [48]
- Shockley was one of the race theorists who received money from the Pioneer Fund, and at least one donation to him came from its founder, the eugenicist Wickliffe Draper.[50][51]
- Shockley proposed a paid sterilization program. Individuals with IQs below 100 should undergo voluntary by getting $1,000 for each of their IQ points under 100. [3]
- The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Shockley as a white nationalist who failed to produce evidence for his eugenic theories amidst a near-universal acknowledgment that his work was that of a racist crank.
- The science writer Angela Saini also characterizes Shockley as a notorious racist.
Shockley's advocacy of eugenics triggered protests. In one incident, the science society Sigma Xi canceled the conference in 1968 in Brooklyn, where Shockley had a speech. [56]
In Atlanta in 1981, Shockley filed a libel suit against the Atlanta Constitution after a science writer, Roger Witherspoon, compared Shockley's advocacy of a voluntary sterilization program to Nazi human experimentation.
The case took three years to go to trial.
He won it but received only one dollar in damages[42] and did not receive any punitive damages.
- Shockley was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 1982 United States Senate election in California.
- He came in eighth place in the primary, receiving 8,308 votes and 0.37% of the vote. [62]
- According to Shurkin, by this time, his racism destroyed his credibility. Almost no one wanted to be associated with him, and many of those willing did him more harm than good.
Personal life:
- At 23, while still a student, Shockley married Jean Bailey in August 1933. The couple had two sons and a daughter. [64]
- Shockley separated from her in 1953. [38]
- He then married Emily Lanning, a psychiatric nurse, in 1955, who helped him with some of his theories. [38][42]
- Shockley was an accomplished rock climber in the Shawangunk Mountains in the Hudson River Valley.
- He was a speaker, lecturer, and amateur magician.
- He once "magically" produced a bouquet of roses at the end of his address before the American Physical Society.
- He was also known in his early years for elaborate practical jokes. [68]
- He had a longtime hobby of raising ant colonies. [12]
- Shockley donated sperm to the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank founded by Robert Klark Graham in hopes of spreading humanity's best genes.
According to PBS, Shockley was cruel towards his children. He reportedly tried playing Russian roulette as part of an attempted suicide. [38]
Honors:
- National Medal of Merit for his war work in 1946. [20]
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Panel of the U.S. Army since 1951
- Morris Leibmann Memorial Prize from the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1952
- Comstock Prize in Physics of the National Academy of Sciences in 1953.
- First recipient of the Oliver E. Buckley Solid State Physics Prize of the American Physical Society in 1953.
- He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. In his Nobel lecture, he gave full credit to Brattain and Bardeen as the inventors of the point-contact transistor.
- He has served on the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board since 1958.
- In 1962, he became the president of the Scientific Advisory Committee.
- Holley Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1963.
- Wilhelm Exner Medal in 1963.
- Honorary science doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Gustavus Adolphus Colleges in Minnesota.
- IEEE Medal of Honor from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1980.
- Shockley was one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century (named by Time magazine).
- Listed at No. 3 on the Boston Globe's 2011 MIT150 list of the top 150 innovators and ideas in the 150-year history of MIT.
Patents:
Shockley received over ninety US patents.[75] Some notable ones are:
· US 2502488 Semiconductor Amplifier. April 4, 1950, his first patent involving transistors;
· US 2569347 Circuit element utilizing semiconductive material. September 25, 1951.
· US 2655609 Bistable Circuits. October 13, 1953, Used in computers;
· US 2787564 Forming Semiconductive Devices by Ionic Bombardment. April 2, 1957. The diffusion process for implantation of impurities;
· US 3031275 Process for Growing Single Crystals. April 24, 1962. Improvements in the production of basic materials; and
· US 3053635 Method of Growing Silicon Carbide Crystals. September 11, 1962, which explored other semiconductors.
Transistor:
A semiconductor device used to amplify electrical signals and power is transistor. In modern electronics, it is one of the basic building blocks, one of the 20th century's greatest inventions. [43][44] It has at least three terminals composed of semiconductor material.
The point-contact transistor was the first working device, invented in 1947. Three scientists, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at Bell Labs, worked together to get this product, and the three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement. [45] Electronic devices like smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, computers, etc., are the effect of the transistor revolution in electronics.
Silicon and Germanium are the semiconductor materials used for the fabrication of transistors.
Death:
Shockley died of prostate cancer in 1989 at the age of 79. His children reportedly learned of his death by reading his obituary in the newspaper.
References:
1. Borrell, Jerry (2001). "They would be gods". Upside. 13 (10): 53 – via ABI/INFORM Global.
2. ^ Jump up to:a b c SFGATE, Mike Moffitt (August 21, 2018). "How a racist genius created Silicon Valley by being a terrible boss". SFGATE. Retrieved July 17, 2022.
3. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f Boyer, Edward J. (August 14, 1989). "Controversial Nobel Laureate Shockley Dies". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved May 11, 2015.
4. ^ Saxon 1989
5. ^ Sparks, Hogan & Linville 1991, pp. 130–132
6. ^ Jump up to:a b "Inventors of the transistor followed diverse paths after 1947 discovery". Bangor Daily News. Associated Press. December 26, 1987. Retrieved July 13, 2022. Although he has received less publicity in recent years, his views have become, if anything, more extreme. He suggested in an interview the possibility of bonus payments to black people for undergoing voluntary sterilization.
7. ^ Jump up to:a b "Palo Alto History". www.paloaltohistory.org. Retrieved December 14, 2020. In Palo Alto, William's temper improved little at first. But ignoring psychiatric recommendations for more socialization, his parents decided to homeschool William until age eight. Finally, feeling they were unable to keep him out of a school setting any longer, they sent him to the Homer Avenue School for two years, where his behavior improved dramatically --- he even earned an "A" in comportment in his first year.
8. ^ Thorp, H. Holden (November 18, 2022). "Shockley was a racist and eugenicist". Science. 378 (6621): 683. Bibcode:2022Sci...378..683T. doi:10.1126/science.adf8117. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 36395223. S2CID 253582584.
9. ^ "Contributors to Proceedings of the I.R.E.". Proceedings of the IRE. 40 (11): 1605–1612. 1952. doi:10.1109/JRPROC.1952.274003.
10. ^ Shurkin 2006, p. 5
11. ^ "William Shockley". American Institute of Physics. September 10, 1974. Retrieved July 17, 2022.
12. ^ Jump up to:a b Hiltzik, Michael A. (December 2, 2001). "The Twisted Legacy of William Shockley". Los Angeles Times.
13. ^ Moll, John L. (1995). A Biographical Memoir of William Bradford Shockley (PDF). Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press.
14. ^ Shurkin 2006, pp. 38–39
15. ^ Jump up to a b Transistor – Innovation at Bell Labs Encyclopedia Britannica
16. ^ Cooper, David Y. (2000). Shockley, William Bradford (13 February 1910–12 August 1989), physicist. American National Biography Online. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1302153.
17. ^ Shurkin 2006, p. 48
18. ^ Broken Genius p. 65–67
19. ^ Dean Barrett, David (2020). 140 days to Hiroshima : the story of Japan's last chance to avert Armageddon. New York. ISBN 978-1-63576-580-9. OCLC 1149147965.
20. ^ Jump up to a b Shurkin 2006, p. 85
21. ^ Giangreco 1997, p. 568
22. ^ Newman, Robert P. (1998). "Hiroshima and the Trashing of Henry Stimson". The New England Quarterly. 71 (1): 27. doi:10.2307/366722. JSTOR 366722.
23. ^ The Artful Universe by John D. Barrow, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995, p. 239
24. ^ Brattain quoted in Crystal Fire p. 127
25. ^ Jump up to a b Crystal Fire p.132
26. ^ CA 272437 "Electric current control mechanism", first filed in Canada on October 22, 1925
27. ^ Lilienfeld Archived October 2, 2006, at the Wayback Machine
28. ^ "William Shockley". IEEE Global History Network. IEEE. Retrieved July 18, 2011.
29. ^ Jump up to a b Michael Riordan & Lillian Hoddeson (1998). Crystal fire: the invention of the transistor and the birth of the information age. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-31851-7.
30. ^ Hoddeson, Lillian; Daitch, Vicki (2002). True genius: the life and science of John Bardeen : the only winner of two Nobel prizes in Physics. Joseph Henry Press. ISBN 978-0-309-08408-6. Retrieved December 30, 2014.
31 ^ "Holding On". The New York Times. April 6, 2008. Retrieved December 7, 2014. In 1955, the physicist William Shockley set up a semiconductor laboratory in Mountain View, partly to be near his mother in Palo Alto. ...
32^ "Two Views of Innovation, Colliding in Washington". The New York Times. January 13, 2008. Retrieved December 7, 2014. The co-inventor of the transistor and the founder of the valley's first chip company, William Shockley, moved to Palo Alto, Calif., because his mother lived there. ...
33 "Inventors of the transistor followed diverse paths after 1947 discovery". Associated Press – Bangor Daily news. December 25, 1987. Retrieved May 6, 2012. 'mixture of cooperation and competition' and 'Shockley, eager to make his own contribution, said he kept some of his own work secrets until "my hand was forced" in early 1948 by an advance reported by John Shive, another Bell Laboratories researcher'
34^ Broken Genius, p 121-122
35^ "1951 – First grown-junction transistors fabricated". Computer History Museum. 2007. Retrieved July 3, 2013.
37^ ScienCentral, ScienCentral. "Bill Shockley, Part 3 of 3". www.pbs.org.
38^ Crystal Fire p. 278
39^ Jump up to:a b c d e "Transistorized! William Shockley". www.pbs.org. 1999. Retrieved July 10, 2022.
40^ "Holding On". The New York Times. April 6, 2008. Retrieved December 7, 2014. In 1955, the physicist William Shockley set up a semiconductor laboratory in Mountain View, partly to be near his mother in Palo Alto. ...
41^ "Two Views of Innovation, Colliding in Washington". The New York Times. January 13, 2008. Retrieved December 7, 2014. The co-inventor of the transistor and the founder of the valley's first chip company, William Shockley, moved to Palo Alto, Calif., because his mother lived there.
42 Wikipedia
43 "Transistor". Britannica. Retrieved January 12, 2021
44Jump up to:8a b "A History of the Invention of the Transistor and Where It Will Lead Us" (PDF). IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS Vol 32 No 12. December 1997
45^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1956". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB. Archived from the original on December 16, 2014. Retrieved December 7, 2014.
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