William B. Shockley
| William Shockley | |
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| Born | William Bradford Shockley Jr. February 13, 1910 Greater London, England, United Kingdom |
| Died | August 12, 1989 (aged 79) Stanford, California, United States |
| Nationality | American |
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| Doctoral advisor | John C. Slater |
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William Bradford Shockley Jr. (/ˈʃɑːkli/; February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was an American physicist and inventor. Shockley was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists invented the point-contact transistor in 1947 and were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s led to California's "Silicon Valley" becoming a hotbed of electronics innovation. In his later life, Shockley was a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and became a proponent of eugenics.
Shockley was born in London, to American parents, and raised in his family's hometown of Palo Alto, California, from age three. His father, William Hillman Shockley, was a mining engineer who speculated in mines for a living, and spoke eight languages. His mother, Mary (née Bradford), grew up in the American West, graduated from Stanford University, and became the first female US Deputy mining surveyor.
Shockley received his Bachelor of Science degree from Caltech in 1932. Shockley received his Ph.D. degree from MIT in 1936. The title of his doctoral thesis was Electronic Bands in Sodium Chloride. His thesis topic was suggested by his thesis advisor, John C. Slater. After receiving his doctorate, Shockley joined a research group headed by Clinton Davisson at Bell Labs in New Jersey. The next few years were productive ones for Shockley. He published a number of fundamental papers on solid state physics in Physical Review. In 1938, he got his first patent, "Electron Discharge Device", on electron multipliers.
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