William Shockley

William Bradford Shockley (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was a British-born American physicist and inventor. Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s led to California's "Silicon Valley" becoming a hotbed of electronics innovation. In his later life, Shockley was a professor at Stanford, and he also became a staunch advocate of eugenics. Shockley was born in London to American parents, and raised in California. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1932. While still a student, Shockley married Iowan Jean Bailey in August of 1933. In March 1934 he and Jean had a baby girl, Alison. Shockley was awarded his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. Notably, the title of his doctoral thesis was Electronic Bands in... full article at wikipedia