William Shockley: Polygraphs, a Four-Layer Diode and a Lab Near His Mom

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William Shockley earned his undergraduate degree at Caltech and a physics PhD at MIT in 1936, then joined Bell Labs, where in 1947 he co-created the first solid-state transistor with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. Bell Labs put Bardeen and Brattain ahead of him on the patent and kept passing him over for promotion because of his abrasive management. After a 1953 sabbatical at Caltech, he won funding from Arnold Beckman, inventor of the electronic pH meter, and in 1956 opened Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, chosen so he could live near his aging mother in Palo Alto. East Coast veterans turned him down, so he hired young scientists including Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce.

Shockley bet on silicon over germanium, but growing single-crystal silicon boules above 1,400 degrees Celsius was hard, and he steered the team toward a secret four-layer diode the lab could not reliably build. When a secretary cut her finger, he suspected sabotage and ordered staff to take polygraph tests. Eight employees asked Beckman to replace him, and when Beckman sided with Shockley they resigned in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor, earning his label "the traitorous eight." His lab was sold to Clevite in 1960, then to ITT, and closed in 1968.

• Texas Instruments had started making commercial silicon transistors in 1954, a year before Beckman backed Shockley.
• The four-layer diode latched on or off with a single pulse, replacing several components in a switching circuit.
• The eight were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts.
• A 2014 count traced over 2,000 companies to the eight and the people they hired, including 92 public firms worth a combined $2.1 trillion.
• The lab at 391 San Antonio Road was a produce market by 2006 and now has a monument with a 2N696 transistor and the four-layer diode.