William Shockley 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 (née Bradford) who had also been engaged
in mining, being a deputy mineral surveyor in Nevada.
The family returned to the United States 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, submitting a thesis on the energy band structure of
sodium chloride. The same year he joined Bell Telephone
Laboratories, working in the group headed by Dr. C.J. Davisson
and remained there (with brief absences for war service, etc.)
until 1955. He resigned his post of Director of the Transistor
Physics Department to become Director of the Shockley
Semi-conductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments, Inc., at
Mountain View, California, for research development and
production of new transistor and other semiconductor devices. In
1963 he was named first Alexander M. Poniatoff Professor of
Engineering Science at Stanford University, where he will act as
professor-at-large in engineering and applied sciences.
During World War II he was Research Director of the
Anti-submarine Warfare Operations Research Group and he
afterwards served as Expert Consultant in the offce of the
Secretary for War.
He held two visiting lectureships: in 1946 at Princeton
University, and in 1954 at the California Institute of
Technology. For one year (1954-1955) he was Deputy Director and
Research Director of the Weapons System Evaluation Group in the
Defence Department.
Shockley's research has been centred on energy bands in solids;
order and disorder in alloys; theory of vacuum tubes;
self-diffusion of copper; theories of dislocations and grain
boundaries; experiment and theory on ferromagnetic domains;
experiments on photoelectrons in silver chloride; various topics
in transistor physics and operations research on the statistics
of salary and individual productivity in research
laboratories.
His work has been rewarded with many honours. He received the
Medal for Merit in 1946, for his work with the War Department;
the Morris Leibmann Memorial Prize of the Institute of Radio
Engineers in 1952; the following year, the Oliver E. Buckley
Solid State Physics Prize of the American Physical Society, and a
year later the Cyrus B. Comstock Award of the National Academy of
Sciences. The crowning honour - the Nobel Prize for Physics -
was bestowed on him in 1956, jointly with his two former
colleagues at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, John Bardeen and
Walter H. Brattain.
In 1963 he was selected as recipient of the Holley Medal of the
American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Dr. Shockley has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel
of the U.S. Army since 1951 and he has served on the Air Force
Scientific Advisory Board since 1958. In 1962 he was appointed to
the President's Scientific Advisory Committee. He has received
honorary science doctorates from the University of
Pennsylvania, Rutgers University and Gustavus Adolphus Colleges (Minn.).
In addition to numerous articles in scientific and technical
journals, Shockley has written Electrons and Holes in
Semiconductors (1950) and has edited Imperfections of
Nearly Perfect Crystals (1952). He has taken out more than 50
U.S. patents for his inventions.
Dr. Shockley has been married twice, and has three children by
his first marriage to Jean (née Bailey). This union
ended in divorce; his second wife is Emmy Lanning.
From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1942-1962, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1964
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
William B. Shockley died on August 12, 1989.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1956