Jun 8, 2008

THEN AND NOW: Shockley sparks life into the valley

By Matt Bowling / Daily News columnist

Editor's note: This is part one of a two part series. Part two will run next week.



It is unlikely that any Palo Altan has ever lived a life as important as William Shockley. As a young man during World War II, he won the nation's highest civilian honor for discoveries that saved thousands of lives. In 1956, he won the Noble Prize in Physics for the invention of the transistor, a device that either made possible or greatly improved nearly every modern gadget we use today. He then moved west and started the company that became the catalyst for the rise of Silicon Valley. He was even named one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century by Time Magazine in 1999.

And yet despite this resume of accomplishment and his indisputable intelligence, Shockley always seemed to find a way to allow his personality to spoil his own success. Throughout his 79 years, Shockley threw tantrums, fought petty disputes and turned his friends into enemies. Finally, as an angry and bitter man in his retirement years, he became the champion of an angry and bitter theory.

His association with it would bring him scorn, ridicule and contempt from the scientific community and the broader public. In the end, his reputation in tatters and his accomplishments largely overshadowed, Shockley would die friendless and ignored as his own worst enemy.

Shockley seemed to enter the world in the midst of a fight. Born in London in 1910 to American parents, Shockley's early childhood was something between tempestuous and the taming of a beast. When he was just a month old, his father wrote in his diary that his child was giving "signs of having a violent temper." Indeed, he was soon biting and slapping his parents, who seemed completely incapable of coping with their son's rage.

In 1913, the Shockleys moved to Palo Alto and lived in a small house on Waverley Street. In Palo Alto, the boy's temper improved little at first. But ignoring psychiatric recommendations for more socialization, his parents decided to home school Shockley until age 8.

Finally, feeling they were unable to keep him out of a school setting any longer, the Shockleys sent the boy to the Homer Avenue School for two years, where his behavior improved dramatically - he even earned an "A" in comportment in his first year. As a teen, he attended the Palo Alto Military Academy.

After earning a doctorate from MIT and gaining employment at Bell Labs, the New Jersey research wing of AT&T, Shockley's plans would be sidetracked by the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

But his accomplishments in the next three war years were astounding. It has been said that he saved thousands of lives without ever leaving his desk, mostly through his work advancing Allied techniques with using radar equipment and depth charges. Later, he completely redesigned the training procedures for American bomber crews. Near the end of the war, he became an expert consultant to the office of the Secretary of War - making him one of the highest ranked civilian scientists outside of the Los Alamos nuclear research labs. For all his war efforts, Shockley was awarded the National Medal of Merit.

Returning to Ma Bell after the war, Shockley was placed at the head of the 34-man Solid State Physics Team, where he oversaw a team of physicists including John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain.

Their task: find a smaller, more reliable alternative to the bulky and fragile glass vacuum tube amplifiers that would not allow for a decent coast-to-coast phone call. Shockley's team used what he would later call "creative failure methodology."

After a series of trial and error setbacks and detours, Bardeen and Brattain finally broke through during the "magic month" of December 1947, inventing what would come to be called the transistor. And while Bell Labs quite rightly gave Shockley full credit as team leader, he would spend the next few years fuming over having to learn of the great discovery over the phone.

After the discovery, Shockley worked tirelessly to add to the invention. In his efforts, he invented a stronger amplifying device, the junction transistor, and then wrote the seminal work of his field, Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors, in 1950. The Shockley transistor would lead to other advances in technology, eventually creating a vast new industry that was at the heart of modern electronics.



To read the entire column go to www.paloaltohistory.com/shockley.html

To read more of Matt Bowling's articles go to www.paloaltohistory.com