William Shockley

 

 

1910-1989.  Shockley was born in London and educated in the United States. From the beginning, his interests were in the field of Physics.The transistor was born just before Christmas 1947. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, two scientists working for William Shockley at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., observed that when electrical signals were applied to contacts on a crystal of germanium, the output power was larger than the input.

Shockley was not present at that first observation. And though he fathered the discovery in the same way Einstein fathered the atom bomb, by advancing the idea and pointing the way, he felt left out of the momentous occasion. In 1956, all three men received the Nobel prize in Physics for their invention. This device eventually became a critical component of all modern computers