Table Of ContentBROKEN GENIUS
BROKEN GENIUS
The rise and fall of William Shockley, creator of the
electronic age
Joel N. Shurkin
Palgrave Macmillan
© joel Shurkin 2006, 2008
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-1-4039-8815-7
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with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in hardback 2006
First published in paperback 2008 by
Macmillan
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Companies and representatives throughout the world
ISBN 978-0-230-55192-3 ISBN 978-0-230-55229-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-55229-6
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Transferred to Digital Printing 20 14
Contents
Preface vii
Part I Moira: May and Billy
1 'I've got dark eyes. I can frighten people.' 3
2 The lightness of being 22
Part II Hubris: war and the transistor
3 'Of a highly explosive character' 45
4 'I hope you have better luck in the future' 63
5 'I think we better call Shockley' 86
6 'There's enough glory in this for everybody' 107
7 ' ... To do my climbing by moonlight & unroped' 125
8 'Well~equipped female with brains' 142
Part III Nemesis: Silicon Valley and obsession
9 'Really peculiar ideas about how to motivate people' 163
10 'Three generations of imbeciles are enough' 190
11 'What law of nature have you discovered?' 212
12 'Someday we may actually be terribly alone' 226
13 'The high cost of thinking the unthinkable' 241
14 'I love you' 257
Bibliography 274
Acknowledgments 285
Index 288
v
For Carol
Ani rDodi, v'Dodi Li
Preface
I believe that William Shockley was, in terms of practical impact on the
world, one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century.
Time magazine agreed in its fin de siecle issue. He led the group at Bell
Telephone Laboratories that created the seminal invention of the
modern world, the transistor. The transistor begot the integrated circuit;
the integrated circuit begot the microprocessor; and when their device
was combined with the computer (invented only a few years earlier), the
greatest social and economic upheaval since the Industrial Revolution
almost two centuries earlier was inevitable. Every home in the devel~
oped world has thousands or even millions of transistors. World com~
merce totally depends on them, as do health care, culture, defense,
transportation, increasingly art - and civilization in general.
Forty years ago, while researching a book in sub~Saharan Africa, I
watched Somali nomads take transistor radios out of their camel~skin
bags to listen to newscasts. Somalia and Ethiopia then were at war over a
patch of the desert and the nomads wanted to make sure they kept their
flocks from stumbling into the shooting. It was their only modern artifact
- except for the Coke bottles they used to plug the holes in the peaks of
their skin tents.
Along with his Bell Labs colleagues, Walter Brattain and John
Bardeen, William Shockley won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956.
He was a key player in the development of the modern science of
operations research. During the Second World War, he used statistics to
show the Air Corps how to maximize its bombing efficiency and the
Navy how to destroy more U~boats and improve the use of airborne
radar. His work also may have saved thousands of lives in the North
Atlantic convoys to Britain. He set up training programs for both ser~
vices. By the end of the war in the Pacific, American bombers, drilled
by Shockley's method, were hitting 95% of their targets through
the clouds. He may even have played a minor role in the decision to drop
the atomic bomb on Japan, marshaling the numbers to demonstrate that
vii
viii PREFACE
B,29 bombing alone would not do enough damage to lessen the blood,
bath of an Allied invasion. His efforts won the National Medal of Merit,
the highest possible civilian decoration.
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the most
prestigious scientific body in America, elected by his peers.
He put the 'silicon' in Silicon Valley, and his failed company was the
grandfather of all Silicon Valley companies, although it ended up break,
ing his heart.
He was a tenured professor at Stanford University, was happily mar,
ried and had all the money he needed to live happily, quietly and well.
He chose not to. He instead set himself up for public ridicule and squan,
dered his public reputation.
Many scientists have stretched beyond their field and made fools of
themselves, or harmed their good name. Few have gone to the lengths
Bill Shockley did to earn the opprobrium of his peers or the public. He
quickly lost all of his friends; indeed, his oldest friend became his most
potent enemy. He became notorious, a scientific pariah.
I wanted to know how that could happen.
So discredited did Bill Shockley become that a kind of revisionist his,
tory took over. 'Oh, you know he really wasn't that important to the
invention of the transistor,' I was told confidentially dozens of times,
usually with a satisfied smile. 'The other two actually invented the tran,
sis tor.' Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. The destruction of his good name was
almost total, and as you will see, almost inevitable. Shockley was
impelled toward self,destruction.
That is the story this book chronicles. Sophocles could have written
the plot.
Uncovering such a complex saga seemed daunting at first. Fortu,
nately, Shockley's family shared one strange quirk. They never threw
anything out. Several rooms and the garage at the Shockley home on
the Stanford campus were stuffed with documents, letters, folders, com,
puter, video and audiotapes, notebooks, diaries, memos, and files. We
had to crack open two safes to get at all the material. And that didn't
include the dozens of boxes already donated to the Stanford University
archives, more than 60 linear feet of stuff, unimaginable stuff. The
Shockley family was in some ways both a biographer's delight and worst
nightmare.
Hidden in all those documents and artifacts and in the recollections
of those who knew him was, I hoped, the answer to the enigma that
PREFACE ix
William Shockley posed: Why would a man as unquestionably brilliant
as he knowingly and deliberately destroy himself?
Joel Shurkin
January 2006
