William Bradford Shockley - Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics 1956, American scientist, researcher and inventor, one of the developers of strategic bombing tactics and the creator of the bipolar transistor.
Childhood and youth
William Shockley's biography began in London in 1910, where his parents, an extremely unusual married couple, lived at that time. William Hillman Shockley, father of the future scientist, polyglot, speculator, mining engineer, descendant of settlers from the Mayflower, son of a whaling skipper, was more than half a century old when he met William's mother, May, who was then 30 years old. May graduated from Stanford University and became the first female surveyor in US history.
Three years after the birth of their son, the Shockley couple, leading a rather luxurious lifestyle and not knowing how to restrain their appetites, went home to the Californian city of Palo Alto, as the money for a bohemian life in London ran out. May's detailed diaries describe William's early years. At 12 months, he already knew the letters of the alphabet, counted, but at the same time he was extremely aggressive, and his parents were afraid that their son was growing up mentally ill.
Due to the unusual talents of the offspring, the parents could not choose a school for him for a long time. Only at the age of 8 did they send him to the expensive private Palo Alto Military Academy. To the surprise of his mother and father, William studied well, became interested in sports and even showed good behavior.
Education and career
1927 was a watershed year for the Shockley family. In the spring, William applied to the University of California, and in the same year Shockley Sr. died of a stroke, leaving his family a pretty decent legacy that provided May and William with an economical but comfortable life.
After a year, William, overcome by his own ambitions and not too happy with the quality of the "general" education, moved to a small but incredibly prestigious college under the direction of the Nobel laureate Millikan. Here, students were engaged exclusively in fundamental science, in particular, quantum mechanics, to which Shockley devoted four subsequent years. Noting the incredible talent of the student, Millikan turned to his friend, also a Nobel laureate (and twice) Linus Polling, and he drew up a curriculum for the promising young physicist Shockley.
In 1932, William continued his education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and finally formed as "a brilliant intellectual, absolutely incapable of perceiving other points of view," according to his classmate, the famous physicist Seitz.
In 1933, Shockley arranged a personal life - Jean Bailey became his wife, who a year later gave birth to his daughter Allison, and then two sons, in 1942 and 1947.
By 1936, William was working on his doctoral dissertation and at the same time accepted an offer to work at the famous research center Bell Labs, where he made his first important discoveries. According to some reports, it was Shockley, along with another physicist, Fisk, who were the developers of the first scheme for a prototype of a nuclear reactor and the principle of creating a nuclear bomb in 1939. However, the US government did not grant patents to inventors in order to prevent strategic projects from falling into private hands.
During World War II, Shockley dealt with all possible military tasks in the field of airstrikes, submarine fleet and others. Work for the US Navy and Air Force allowed the scientist to make a number of important discoveries in the field of strategic bombing and technical equipment of the army, and at the same time seriously influenced his psyche. The family was on the verge of disintegration, and the scientist himself plunged into a deep depression, in 1943 he made an unsuccessful attempt to shoot himself.
After the war, Shockley retired from military research and became closely involved in the creation of semiconductor devices. The result of his work was the creation of the transistor, a joint project with scientists from Bell Labs, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. Moreover, in the final stage of the work, William did not take any part, which he later regretted, realizing that he might have missed the biggest discovery in his life. But soon Shockley began to develop the theory of the junction transistor - and this work earned him the Nobel Prize in 1956.
End of career and recent years
By the sixties, William Shockley was a man obsessed with a cult of his own intellect, combining the talents of an amazing theorist and an excellent, albeit very tough teacher. He left his cancer patient wife, found for himself a resigned girlfriend Amy Lenning, who endured his humiliating attitude, in 1956 opened a laboratory of his name, which later became one of the origins of "Silicon Valley", where he spent most of his time.
All this eventually ended in the famous "Treacherous Eight" scandal. After the G8 left, Shockley decided that he had hired “the wrong kind of people” and changed the requirements for candidates wishing to work on his team, putting their willingness to obey any of his orders without complaint. However, the new scheme did not work. After six years of agonizing attempts to invent something, the laboratory was closed.
In 1961, Shockley had an accident and spent a year in a hospital bed. It was then that he became carried away by the ideas of eugenics and suddenly set out to "cleanse", in his opinion, an already degenerating American nation. He held a series of public events and lectures in support of his ideas, considering the study of heredity to be much more important than work in physics, but did not receive the desired response and funding from either the public or from colleagues.
As a result, the scientist's overtly Nazi theories led to the destruction of his reputation and expulsion from the scientific community. In 1987, William was diagnosed with prostate cancer, from which he died in August 1989.
