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Transistor

William Bradford Shockley, inventor of the transistor, was born in London on February 13, 1910 to American parents. His father, a mining engineer, and mother, a mineral surveyor, were on a business assignment there for several years. While Shockley was a toddler, the family returned to their home in Palo Alto, California, where Shockley spent the majority of his early life.

A neighbor who taught physics at nearby Stanford University inspired Shockley's interest in the subject, thus he decided to major in physics when he went to college. Shockley earned a bachelor's degree from California Instititute of Technology in 1932, and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. After his graduation he went to work at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

Before the transistor, computers filled huge, refrigerated rooms designed to keep cool the thousands of hot vacuum tubes needed to keep them running. These tubes were used as valves to control the flow of electrons in radios and telephone-relay systems. Crystals, particularly crystals that can conduct a bit of electricity, could do the job faster, more reliably and with one million times less power, but someone needed to figure out how to get them to function as electronic valves. Shockley and his team came up with a way to accomplish this trick.

A little more than a decade after Shockley began working for Bell Labs, he and two colleagues, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, came up with the transistor, a word they created from "transfer" and "resistor." It was a piece of gold foil wrapped around a plastic knife, pressed against a block of germanium that had an electrical connection at its base. Though the design of this early device may now seem primitive, it was at the time, a brand new and immensely more efficient kind of valve to allow, resrtict and amplify the flow of electricity. The device would allow computer work to be done at the speed of light and make it possible for electronic devices to be built smaller, lighter and cheaper.

Shortly thereafter, Shockley set about to find an explanation of the effect from what was then known of the quantum physics of semiconductors. Within a few weeks, he developed the underlying theory of an even more robust amplifying device--a kind of 'sandwich' made of a crystal with varying impurities added. This device came to be known as the junction transistor. By 1951 Shockley's co-workers made a prototype of this and demonstrated that it behaved much as his theory had predicted.

For the next couple of decades new transistor designs flooded the market. Shockley's invention had created a new industry, one that underlies all of modern electronics. In 1956, Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain shared a Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention.

That year, Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory with the goal of developing and producing a silicon transistor. He chose to establish this start-up near Palo Alto, where he had grown up. That is when what is now known as "Silicon Valley" was born.

In 1963 Shockley left the electronics industry and accepted an appointment at Stanford. He went on to do a great deal of original research in electronics and allied fields. Shockley, who holds some 90 patents, died of cancer in 1989 at the age of 79.

[January 2001]