Shockley, William Bradford

SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology, Telecommunications

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b. 13 February 1910 London, England

d. 12 August 1989, Palo Alto, California, USA.

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American physicist who developed the junction transistor from the point contact transistor and was joint winner (with John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain) of the 1956 Nobel Prize for physics.

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The son of a mining engineer, Shockley graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1932 and in 1936 obtained his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In that year, he joined the staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Since the early days of radio, crystals of silicon or similar materials had been used to rectify alternating current supply until these were displaced by thermionic valves or tubes. Shockley, with Bardeen and Brattain, found that crystals of germanium containing traces of certain impurities formed far better rectifiers than crystals of the material in its pure form. The resulting device, the transistor, could also be used to amplify the current; its name is derived from its ability to transfer current across a resistor. The transistor, being so much smaller than the thermionic valve which it replaced, led to the miniaturization of electronic appliances. Another advantage was that a transistorized device needed no period of warming up, such as was necessary with a thermionic valve before it would operate. The dispersal of the heat generated by a multiplicity of thermionic valves such as were present in early computers was another problem obviated by the advent of the transistor.

Shockley was responsible for much development in the field of semiconductors. He was Deputy Director of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the US Department of Defense (1954–5), and in 1963 he was appointed the first Poniatoff Professor of Engineering Science at Stanford University, California. During the late 1960s Shockley became a controversial figure for expressing his unorthodox views on genetics, such as that black people were inherently less intelligent than white people, and that the population explosion spread "bad" genes at the expense of "good" genes; he supported the idea of a sperm bank from Nobel Prize winners, voluntary sterilization and the restriction of interracial marriages.

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Principal Honours and Distinctions

Nobel Prize for Physics 1956.

Further Reading

I.Asimov (ed.), 1982, Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, New York: Doubleday \& Co.

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