William Shockley

Born on 13 February 1910 in London, William Shockley was an engineer who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of the transistor but spent his later years preaching that black people are genetically inferior to white people. Shockley earned a PhD from MIT in 1936 and began doing solid-state physics work at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. After conducting research for the Navy during World War II, he rejoined Bell and investigated the use of semiconductors as an alternative to vacuum tubes for amplifying and channeling electronic signals. In 1947, Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain invented the point-contact transistor ; the following year they created the junction transistor. The three scientists’ work ushered in the modern era of electronics. Shockley later wrote a book and became a professor at Stanford University. In the years following his Nobel, Shockley was known more for his ignorant views on race than his physics achievements. He maintained that blacks’ genetic inferiority prevented them from having the intelligence of whites. Shockley died in Palo Alto, California, in 1989. (Photo credit: Fred English Photographs, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

Date in History: 13 February 1910