2. About William Shockley
• Born in London, England
• White
• Nationality of the United States
• He was born in London, England, on 13th February,
1910, the son of William Hillman Shockley, a mining
engineer born in Massachusetts and his wife, Mary who
had also been engaged in mining, being a deputy
mineral surveyor in Nevada.
• His family returned to the United States when he was a
toddler in 1913 and William Jr. was educated in
California, taking his B.Sc. degree at the California
Institute of Technology in 1932. He studied at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Professor
J.C. Slater and obtained his Ph.D. in 1936
3. About William Shockley Cont'd
• During World War II he was Research
Director of the Anti-submarine Warfare
Operations Research Group
• Dr. Shockley has been married twice, and has three children
by his first marriage to Jean. This union ended in divorce; his
second wife is Emmy Lanning.He had two sons and one
daughter. Mountain climbing was his chief hobby, which he
did not pursue so much for relaxation, family members noted,
as for a problem to be solved.
• His greatest acomplishment was when he was awarded with
the crowning honour - the Nobel Prize for Physics - it was
bestowed on him in 1956, jointly with his two former
colleagues at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, John Bardeen
and Walter H. Brattain.
4. Contributions and Awards
• He began work immediately at Bell Labs.
His research in solid state physics, especially vacuum tubes, made
many theoretical advances in the company's goal to use electronic
switches for telephone exchanges instead of the mechanical
switches used up until then.He worked on solid-state research,
investigating semiconductors.
• One of his major contributions to the electronics industry was to
apply quantum theory to the development of semiconductors. In
1947, with colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, he made
the first successful amplifying semiconductor device. They called it
a transistor (from transfer and resistor). Shockley made
improvements to it in 1950 which made it easier to manufacture. His
original idea eventually led to the development of the silicon chip.
Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain won the 1956 Nobel Prize for the
development of the transistor. It allowed electonic devices to be built
smaller and lighter and even cheaper.
