William Shockley

William Shockley
William Shockley
	Shockley in 1956
Born	William Bradford Shockley; February 13, 1910; London, UK
Died	August 12, 1989 (aged 79); Stanford, California, US
Resting place	Alta Mesa Memorial Park, Palo Alto, California
Education	Hollywood High School
Alma mater	California Institute of Technology (BS); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD);
Known for	Shockley diode; Shockley diode equation; Haynes–Shockley experiment; Bipolar junction transistor; Point-contact transistor;
Political party	Republican
Spouses	; Jean Bailey (m. 1933; sep. 1953) ; Emmy Lanning (m. 1955)
Children	3
Parents	William H. Shockley (father); May Bradford (mother);
Awards	IRE Morris Liebmann Memorial Prize (1952); Comstock Prize in Physics (1953); Oliver E. Buckley Prize (1953); Nobel Prize in Physics (1956); Wilhelm Exner Medal (1963); Holley Medal (1963); IEEE Medal of Honor (1980);
	Scientific career
Fields	Solid-state physics
Institutions	Bell Telephone Laboratories; Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory; Stanford University;
Thesis	Electronic bands in sodium chloride (1936)
Doctoral advisor	John C. Slater

William Bradford Shockley (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was an American solid-state physicist. He was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect."

Partly as a result of Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s, California's Silicon Valley became a hotbed of electronics innovation. He recruited brilliant employees, but quickly alienated them with his autocratic and erratic management; they left and founded major companies in the industry.

In his later life, while he was a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and afterward, Shockley became known as a racist and a eugenicist.