William Bradford Shockley, American physicist, shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics with 2 other American physicists, John Bardeen (1908-1991) and Walter H. Brattain (1902-1987) for “their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.” This work ushered in the age of microminiature electronics. The transistor (transfer plus resistor, transferred current across a resistor) works as a semiconductor that transmits electricity in one direction only and functions as a rectifier in transforming alternating current to direct current. In electronics, the transistor has replaced the vacuum tube and has many applications in medical technology.
Shockley was born on February 13, 1910, in London, England. His father, a mining engineer, and his mother were in London on a business trip. Three years later, the family returned to the United States and settled in Palo Alto, California, where Shockley received his early education. He graduated from Hollywood High School in 1927, after which he attended the University of California at Los Angeles for 1 year. He transferred to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech at Pasadena), from which he received a BS degree with a major in physics in 1932. He then entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, from which he received a PhD degree in physics in 1936. His doctoral thesis was “Calculations of Wave Function for Electrons in Sodium Chloride Crystals.” While at MIT, Shockley was a teaching fellow (1932-1936).
In 1936, Shockley became employed at the Bell Telephone Laboratories at Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he began the research that led to the invention and development of the transistor. He remained at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1936 to 1955 as Director of the Transistor Physics Department, except for two brief visiting professorships—one at Princeton University, New Jersey, in 1946 and the other at Caltech from 1954 to 1955—and some years in government during World War II (1939-1945). From 1942 to 1944 he was research director of the Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group set up by the US Navy Department of Columbia University, New York City, and from 1944 to 1945 he was a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of War.
After the war, Shockley returned to Bell Telephone Laboratories as director of the solid-state research program and resumed work on semiconductors. In 1947, Bardeen and Brattain made the first successful amplifying semicondutor device—the transistor. Interestingly, in the field of radio reception and transmission, reception started early with a galena crystal (lead sulfide) and a cat's whisker (wire coil), moved through the era of the vacuum tube, and came full circle with the era of a germanium crystal (transistor).
In 1955, Shockley left Bell Telephone Laboratories and formed his own company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories, of which he was director. In 1958 the company changed its name to Shockley Transistor Corporation and became a subsidiary of Beckman Instruments, Inc, in Palo Alto, California. From 1958 to 1963, he served in various capacities in that company until he officially joined the faculty of Stanford University in Palo Alto. In 1958 Shockley became a lecturer at Stanford University, and in 1963 he was appointed the first Alexander M. Poniatoff Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at the university, where he taught until his retirement in 1975.
Shockley held more than 90 patents in the field of semiconductors and wrote extensively in that field. Among his publications was Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors, published in 1950.
On August 12, 1989, at the age of 79 years, William Shockley died in Palo Alto. He was honored on a stamp (Scott No. 2183) issued in 1998 by Antigua and Barbuda.