47 Facts About William Shockley

William Shockley was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain.

William Shockley was born to American parents in London on February 13,1910, and was raised in his family's hometown of Palo Alto, California, from the age of three.

William Shockley's father, William Hillman Shockley, was a mining engineer who speculated in mines for a living and spoke eight languages.

William Shockley was homeschooled up to the age of eight, due to his parents' dislike of public schools as well as William Shockley's habit of violent tantrums.

William Shockley learned some physics at a young age from a neighbor who was a Stanford physics professor.

William 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.

William Shockley earned his Bachelor of Science degree from Caltech in 1932 and a PhD from MIT in 1936.

William Shockley was one of the first recruits to Bell Labs by Mervin Kelly, who became director of research at the company in 1936 and focused on hiring solid-state physicists.

William Shockley joined a group headed by Clinton Davisson in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

William Shockley conceived a number of designs based on copper-oxide semiconductor materials, and with Walter Brattain unsuccessfully attempted to create a prototype in 1939.

William Shockley published a number of fundamental papers on solid state physics in Physical Review.

William Shockley traveled frequently to the Pentagon and Washington to meet high-ranking officers and government officials.

In July 1945, the War Department asked William Shockley to prepare a report on the question of probable casualties from an invasion of the Japanese mainland.

William Shockley was the first physicist to propose a log-normal distribution to model the creation process for scientific research papers.

William Shockley's name was not on any of these patent applications.

William Shockley even made efforts to have the patent written only in his name, and told Bardeen and Brattain of his intentions.

William Shockley, angered by not being included on the patent applications, secretly continued his own work to build a different sort of transistor based on junctions instead of point contacts; he expected this kind of design would be more likely to be commercially viable.

William Shockley was dissatisfied with certain parts of the explanation for how the point contact transistor worked and conceived of the possibility of minority carrier injection.

William Shockley later described the workings of the team as a "mixture of cooperation and competition".

William Shockley said that he kept some of his own work secret until his "hand was forced" by Shive's 1948 advance.

William Shockley worked out a rather complete description of what he called the "sandwich" transistor, and a first proof of principle was obtained on April 7,1949.

Meanwhile, William Shockley worked on his magnum opus, Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors which was published as a 558-page treatise in 1950.

William Shockley was forty-one years old; this was rather young for such an election.

William Shockley left Bell Labs around 1953 and took a job at Caltech.

In 1956, William Shockley started William Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, which was close to his elderly mother in Palo Alto, California.

William Shockley recruited brilliant employees to his company, but alienated them by undermining them relentlessly.

William Shockley argued that a higher rate of reproduction among purportedly less intelligent people was having a dysgenic effect, and argued that a drop in average intelligence would lead to a decline in civilization.

William Shockley claimed that black people were genetically and intellectually inferior to white people.

William Shockley proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 should be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization, $1,000 for each of their IQ points under 100.

The science writer Angela Saini describes William Shockley as having been "a notorious racist".

William Shockley wrote that his findings do not support white supremacy, instead claiming that East Asians and Jews fare better than whites intellectually.

In one incident, the science society Sigma Xi, fearing violence, canceled a 1968 convocation in Brooklyn where William Shockley was scheduled to speak.

William Shockley won the suit but he only received one dollar in damages and he did not receive any punitive damages.

William Shockley taped his telephone conversations with reporters, transcribed them, and sent the transcripts to the reporters by registered mail.

William Shockley was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 1982 United States Senate election in California.

William Shockley ran on a single-issue platform of opposing the "dysgenic threat" that he alleged African-Americans and other groups posed.

At age 23 and while still a student, William Shockley married Jean Bailey in August 1933.

William Shockley married Emily Lanning, a psychiatric nurse, in 1955; she helped him with some of his theories.

William Shockley was an accomplished rock climber, going often to the Shawangunks in the Hudson River Valley.

William Shockley was popular as a speaker, lecturer, and amateur magician.

William Shockley was known in his early years for elaborate practical jokes.

William Shockley had a longtime hobby of raising ant colonies.

William 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.

The bank, called by the media the "Nobel Prize sperm bank", claimed to have three Nobel Prize-winning donors, though William Shockley was the only one to publicly acknowledge his involvement.

William Shockley reportedly tried playing Russian roulette as part of an attempted suicide.

William Shockley died of prostate cancer in 1989 at the age of 79.

William Shockley is interred at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, California.