Biography of william shockley nobel

William Shockley, Stanford professor and winner of the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for his co-invention of the transistor, was arguably the single person most responsible for ushering in the computer age. He was also an ardent eugenicist whose theories of black racial inferiority eventually made him an academic pariah.

Despite having no training whatsoever in genetics, biology or psychology, Shockley devoted the last decades of his life to a quixotic struggle to prove that black Americans were suffering from “dysgenesis,” or “retrogressive evolution,” and advocated replacing the welfare system with a “Voluntary Sterilization Bonus Plan,” which, as its name suggests, would pay low-IQ women to undergo sterilization. Although his theories were universally condemned by biologists as racist pseudoscience, Shockley partly succeeded in rehabilitating eugenics as an ideology by providing the foundations for a new, more politically savvy generation of academic racists, including Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn and Charles Murray.

In his own words:
“Babies too often get an unfair shake from a badly-loaded parental genetic dice cup. At the acme of unfairness are features of racial differences that my own research inescapably leads me to conclude exist: Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectually rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably be used by the pragmatic man-in-the-street.”
—“Models, Mathematics, and the Moral Obligation to Diagnose the Origin of Negro IQ Deficits,” Review of Educational Research, 1971.

“Preliminary research suggested that an increase of 1% in Caucasian ancestry raises Negro IQ an average of one point for low IQ populations. It should be kept in mind, however, that no conclusive evidence has been presented. In responding to a recent questionnaire, the majority of 23 presidents of predominantly Neg

Biography

William Shockley gained fame and shared a Nobel Prize for his development of point-contact transistors, work that provided the basis for one of the sweeping technological revolutions of the twentieth century. His junction and field-effect transistors became workhorses of the electronics industry. In later years, he would gain notoriety for his views on eugenics. In sum, he was a brilliant, pivotal and controversial figure, stimulating to work with but often difficult to work for. But even his failures could catalyse important change: the men who fled his autocratic management of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory founded the key companies in the integrated circuit revolution, qualifying Shockley at the very least as the grandfather of Silicon Valley.

Shockley was born in London to American parents, William and May. His father was a mining engineer and his mother was one of the first women surveyors in the United States. During his early childhood, his family moved a great deal, and his parents educated him at home until he was eight years old. After the Shockleys settled in California, William began to attend school. He received his B.S. degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1932. Soon thereafter, pursuing a fascination in the new European theories of quantum mechanics, he traveled

William Shockley Jr. (February 13, 1910–August 12, 1989) was an American physicist, engineer, and inventor who led the research team credited with developing the transistor in 1947. For his achievements, Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. As a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University during the late 1960s, he was harshly criticized for advocating the use of selective breeding and sterilization to address what he believed to be the genetically inherited intellectual inferiority of the Black race.

Early Life and Education

William Bradford Shockley Jr. was born on February 13, 1910 in London, England to American citizen parents and raised in the family’s home in Palo Alto, California. Both his father, William Hillman Shockley, and his mother, May Shockley were mining engineers. Having grown up around gold mining in the American West, May Shockley had graduated from Stanford University and became the first woman to serve as a U.S. Deputy Minerals Mining Surveyor.

In 1932, Shockley earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the Califor

He shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for his work on these projects. When Shockley left Bell Labs to establish his own company, he set up shop near Palo Alto, California. His research there focused upon developing silicon-based semiconductor devices, making him the first to introduce silicon into the area now known as Silicon Valley.

Shockley was born in London in 1910 to American parents. The family returned to the United States a few years later, settling in Palo Alto, California. Shockley attended Palo Alto Military Academy, then Hollywood High School. For college, he enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles, transferring to the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) after a year. In 1932, he received a B.S. in physics. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) offered Shockley a graduate fellowship; he received his Ph.D. there in 1936.

Shockley accepted a research position at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey after graduation from MIT. He worked there for nearly 20 years, gradually advancing through the ranks. His work there was interrupted by World War II when, as part of the war effort, Shockley studied anti-submarine warfare and was later a consultant to the Secretary of War.

When that conflict ended, Shockley resumed working at Bell, where significant changes were taking place. Shockley became leader of a new group of researchers studying semiconductors, which they hoped to use in electronic signal amplification and control. Brattain and Bardeen both became members of the group and together succeeded in building the world’s first working transistor in 1947. With success came controversy. As leader of the group, Shockley believed that he deserved credit for the invention and wanted it patented in his name. Brattain and Bardeen disagreed, since the work did not directly involve Shockley, who usually carried out his own research independently from the group. Bell de