Fabian Bachrach

(1910–89). U.S. engineer and teacher William Shockley was a cowinner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956. He helped develop, together with John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain, the transistor. This device replaced the bigger and less-efficient vacuum tube and ushered in the age of microminiature electronics.

William Bradford Shockley was born on Feb. 13, 1910, in London. He graduated with a doctorate in physics from Harvard University in 1936 and then joined the technical staff of the Bell Telephone Laboratories. As director of Bell’s research program on solid-state physics, Shockley worked with Bardeen and Brattain to use semiconductors as amplifiers and controllers of electronic signals. The three men invented the point-contact transistor in 1947 and a more effective device, the junction transistor, in 1948. Shockley established a semiconductor laboratory in 1955. In 1958 he began a career at Stanford University in California, first as a lecturer and in 1963 as a professor of engineering science.

During the late 1960s Shockley began to espouse controversial views on the intellectual differences among ethnic groups. He felt that standardized intelligence tests show that genetics are involved in intelligence; furthermore, he believed that blacks scored lower than whites on IQ tests because of genetic inferiority. He was widely condemned for his beliefs. Shockley died on Aug. 12, 1989, in Palo Alto, Calif.