The life of a Nobel laureate is boycotted by employees

William Shockley won the Nobel Prize but was named the worst leader in Silicon Valley, hated and ended his life in solitude.

Few scientists are as talented as William Shockley , and few are as controversial as he is.

Shockley was born in 1910 in London (UK), has a father who is an eight-language mining engineer and his mother is the first female mine appraiser in the United States, a graduate of Stanford University. At the age of three, Shockley followed his family to Palo Alto, California.

From an early age, Shockley has shown a hot temper. He learned at home until he was 8 years old, partly because of his intelligent parents, partly because he could not control his anger.

"He almost shows only one emotion and is angry," Shockley's father wrote in a letter.

Scientist William Shockley.(Photo: Stanford).

When he was in high school, Shockley showed great scientific talent and arrogance. Fred Seitz, Shockley's childhood friend and famous scientist, said: "There are two things about him that make me very impressed. First, that is the ability to be creative, looking for problems. core and make them clear. Second, it is arrogance. He thinks of himself as the most important person and thinks that society must be led by an elite individual. "

Shockley earned a Bachelor of Science degree at the California Institute of Technology in 1932 and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. After he finished his studies, he joined a research group at Bell Labs, New Jersey. He published many papers on solid matter, and in 1938 he received the first patent for an electron discharge device.

During World War II, Shockley made many contributions to the field of Mathematical Operations . Using statistical techniques, he significantly increased the efficiency of the German submarine hunt in the Atlantic. However, the obsession with the war made Shockley attempt to commit suicide and increasingly alienated from his wife, Jean.

After the war ended, Bell Labs assigned Shockley to study semiconductors. After two years, two excellent employees under Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, discovered the transistor. According to author Joel N. Shurkin in Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age , this changed Shockley's life. Fearing that they would not be credited, the scientist isolated himself, competed with his own team and invented bipolar transistors.

From left to right: John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain.(Photo: Research Gate).

Shockley's success did not relieve tension between him and his colleagues."Every time someone came up with a new idea, he said it was in his notebook," revealed John L. Moll, a scientist who worked at Bell Labs.

Bardeen and Brattain no longer wanted to work under Shockley. In the meantime, Shockley feels he is not being recognized and paid well. He told friends about his desire to start his own company to raise millions. At the same time, Shockley divorced his wife fighting cancer and married a nurse named Emmy Lanning.

In 1955 Shockley contracted millionaire Arnold O. Beckman to establish Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories in California. Beckman is committed to funding research facilities and equipment for Shockley.

Though bossy and arrogant, Shockley possesses the ability to detect talented people and persuasive talents. As a result, many young scientists, despite being warned about the opposite manager, are still determined to join Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.

Shockley semiconductor laboratory with a multidisciplinary team of physicists, chemists and engineers has seeded the industry in Silicon Valley. Before long, the staff realized the reverse when working with Shockley. Instead of letting employees take the lead in their work, Shockley constantly intervened and criticized.

"At first, he considered you to be the best person in the world. Gradually, your importance went down. From complimenting your intelligence, he moved on to saying you worked well and doubted you. Late." along with, he asserts you can't do it, " said C. Sheldon Roberts, a scientist who worked under Shockley.

In November 1956, nine months after establishing his own research facility, Shockley co-received the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on semiconductors and the detection of transistor effects with Bardeen and Brattain.

As the weeks went by, the atmosphere at Shockley Laboratories became unprecedentedly heavy. The reputation made Shockley even more authoritarian and annoying. In addition, the staff realized that Shockley's spirit was very unstable.

One time, a female researcher in the research room had a sharp object in her hand. Shockley suspected that someone was sabotaging his facility so he asked all staff to check with the lie machine.

Another time, investor Arnold Beckman came to Shockley, announcing the laboratory had to change the way it worked to save costs. Hearing that, Shockley shouted angrily: "I can take the whole team and work anywhere". Longtime employees were astonished at Shockley's ability to deceive himself: the truth is that none of them wants to follow the leader anymore.

Unable to keep up with Shockley, in mid-1957, eight employees including Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts decided to quit. Earlier, they had met Arnold Beckman to ask for a replacement but were refused.

Upon finding the investor, the eight employees opened their own company, named Fairchild Semiconductor Company.

The "eight traitors" left Shockley.(Photo: Medium).

Shockley called this a betrayal, eight former employees became "eight traitors". However, while Shockley's lab could not "float" , Fairchild ate it out. After two years, the company's staff increased from 8 to 4,000. In 1960, Fairchild's turnover was $ 130 million.

Frustrated by the business situation, Arnold Beckman sold Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. In 1963, Shockley accepted an offer to teach at Stanford University. He continued to cause controversy because of the theory about the relationship between intelligence and genetics. In 1965, Shockley criticized relief and welfare programs that prevented natural selection from "eliminating the bottom population." The scientist also asserts that IQ of black people is not as high as IQ of white people.

Shockley even publicly demeaned his three children, though two of them graduated from Radcliffe and Stanford University."Their mother, my first wife, did not achieve high academic achievement like me," the scientist said.

Shockley was hated by his colleagues and friends. In 1989, he had prostate cancer. When dying, next to the scientist, only his wife. The Shockley children read the news of their father's death through the newspaper.

"He died alone," said Joel Shurkin, author of Shockley's unpublished biography. "His life was like tragedy in Greek mythology, but there was no salvation at the end."