SONS HONOR FATHER BY DEVOURING HIM

Born in England, trained at CalTech and MIT, WIlliam Shockley (along with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain) invented the solid-state transistor. The team was looking for an alternative to fragile glass vacuum tubes, so researched the flow of electrons in solid state crystals. Silicon proved fertile. Bell Labs originally left Shockley's name off of the first transistor patent out of fear of conflicting with a 1930 one issued to a scientist named Lilenfield.

Shockley didn't like this one bit. Shockley was considered secretive and conniving, but loved publicity and craved executive management. Leaving Bell Labs, he returned to CalTech to teach for a while. Then, with his friend Beckman, he started Shockley Semiconductor Labs in Mountain View. It has been said that Shockley first brought the Silicon to Silicon Valley. He toasted his crew of young engineers at Dinah's Shack restaurant in Palo Alto and put them to work in a new kind of firm.

Not too long after that, some of his savvy young engineers, called "The Traitorous Eight", resigned and started Fairchild Semiconductor.

"If you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification."

Like Professor Mansfield of Harvard spouting off this year about "manliness", Shockley besmirched his reputation by advancing racial intellience theories. Instead of being remembered solely as a major technologist, his reputation is that of a crackerbarrel racist. He advocated eugenics and the dubious research of Cyril Burt, trumpeted African American's "dysgenic" lower scores on IQ tests, and advocated people with IQs under 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization He publicly donated sperm to a now-defunct bank called Repository for Germinal Choice, restricted to high IQ carriers, and (allegedly) some other Nobel Prizewinners besides spoutin' Shockley.

Like an old "All in the Family" tussle between Archie Bunker and his son-in-law Meathead, it's not unusal for my generation to be pissed off at our fathers' racism. My dad believed Jesse Owens won in the 1936 Olympics because of that "extra set of muscles". This summer I dawdle and am distracted from completing this project, disappointing or frustrating my collaboratiors Jim and Julie, as I struggle to swallow my inheritance of many rooms in that house on Pomona full of dusty, mouse-dropping'd laboratory test electronics, dating back to the era of Shockley's research and those dumb, dangerous societal ideas of his day.

Reference consulted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley

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