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Does William Shockley deserve more credit for the transistor?

bluescreen

Silicon Valley folklore holds that William Shockley, a brilliant physicist who headed up Bell Labs solid-state group after World War II, could never accept that his employees, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, received credit for discovering the property of electrical transistence instead of him. Bell Labs famously arranged photo-ops like the one below to suggest that Shockley, seated at the microscope, was as closely involved in the discovery of the transistor as Bardeen and Brattain.

 

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The collegiality of the group quickly broke down, and Shockley went on the found the short-lived Shockley Semiconductors, where his personality quirks alienated many of his employees.

 

"Shockley was very quick mentally," says Conyers Herring, another Bell scientist who worked with him. "He was always a jump ahead of me, and it was difficult to persuade him of anything. He realized his own superiority. He always felt his own way of looking at things was better than anyone else's. Nine times out of 10 it was, but the 10th time got him in trouble because he didn't study the literature sufficiently carefully or didn't accept ideas from people who didn't explain themselves well enough to him."

 

Despite this, there is a strong case to be made for the idea that, were it not for Shockley's penetrating insights into the behavior of solid state surfaces, Bardeen and Brattain would never have made their famous discovery. It was Shockley who first pointed them to explore the activity of electronics at the boundary of p- and n-layers. And it was Bardeen who worked out the theoretical framework which led to Bardeen and Brattain's laboratory results about transistence. Shockley even predicted the nature of electronic transistence years before its discovery based upon his theoretical understanding of quantum behavior at the juncture of oppositely-charged surfaces.

 

It's easy to criticize William Shockley for this personal shortcomings and terrible people skills. But has history been too quick to underplay the role he played in the discovery of the transistor, the component upon which the entire Information Age is based?

 

Tell us what you think in the comments below!

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    That picture is great. I'd seen it a bunch of times, but had never really studied Bardeen's expression until now!

     

    Yeah, Shockley was an original. I'd read about the infamous "cut finger" episode in Crystal Fire (which is now reading). I think the magnitude of Shockley's personality flaws have masked his true brilliance as a physicist to some degree. When I started Crystal Fire, I expected to find a confirmation of my bias that Shockley had tried to claim credit for Bardeen and Brattain's work. I was surprised to find myself becoming more sympathetic to him as the story went on. As you say, his knack for hiring and alienating talented people was a significant factor in the birth of the valley. But he was one of the few people smart enough back in the 1940's to take all of the bizarre findings in quantum mechanics from Bohr, Einstein, Born, and others and figure out an incredibly practical application for it.

  • According to SillyIcon Valley lore as I heard it (and pretty well confirmed by Wikipedia) Dr. Shockley is largely responsible for creating SillyIcon valley by recruiting top talent and hopelessly mismanaging them so that they'd leave and start Fairchild Semiconductor, then Intel, then AMD, etc.  They say SillyIcon Valley is like a forest in constant renewal, where companies get stodgy and rot or burn down as if in a forest fire, and new ventures grow from the ashes.

     

    Anywhere, there's some pretty fascinating history at Wikipedia:

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley_Semiconductor_Laboratory

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor#1950s

     

    A teaser from the first link:

    Shockley became convinced that the new device would be just as important as the transistor, and kept the entire project secret, even within the company. This led to increasingly paranoid behavior; in one famed incident he was convinced that a secretary's cut finger was a plot to injure him and ordered lie detector tests on everyone in the company. This was combined with Shockley's vacillating management of the projects; some times he felt that getting the basic transistors into immediate production was paramount, and would de-emphasize the Shockley diode project in order to make the "perfect" production system. This upset many of the employees, and mini-rebellions became commonplace.

    Regarding who invented the transistor and whether management swooped in to claim credit as if in a Dilbert cartoon, I'll only say this: I think the expression on Dr. Bardeen's face is priceless.  Here's a higher resolution photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen#/media/File:Bardeen_Shockley_Brattain_1948.JPG