William Shockley | phyiscsknow

The Bell Laboratories engineer shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for the development of the transist

or, which sparked the modern age of electronics.Born on 13 February 1910 in London, William Shockley was an engineer who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for the development of the transistor. He 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, Bardeen, and 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—he maintained that black people are genetically inferior to white people—than his physics achievements. He died in Palo Alto, California, in 1989.