Search results
William Bradford Shockley Jr. (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was an American inventor, physicist, and eugenicist. He was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain.
Apr 9, 2018 · Learn about the life and achievements of William Shockley, one of the fathers of the transistor, the device that revolutionized the twentieth century. Discover how he competed with his colleagues Bardeen and Brattain, and how he founded the first semiconductor company in Silicon Valley.
William B. Shockley was an American engineer and teacher, cowinner (with John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain) of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956 for their development of the transistor, a device that largely replaced the bulkier and less-efficient vacuum tube and ushered in the age of.
Quantum mechanics gave new insight into the properties of these materials. In 1947 John Bardeen and Walter Brattain produced a semiconductor amplifier, which was further developed by William Shockley. The component was named a “transistor”.
William Bradford Shockley was head of the solid-state physics team at Bell Labs that developed the first point-contact transistor, which he quickly followed up with the invention of the more advanced junction transistor. He shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for his work on these projects.
In 1939, William Shockley at AT&T’s Bell Labs revived the idea as a way to replace vacuum tubes. Under Shockley’s direction, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated in 1947 the first semiconductor amplifier: the point-contact transistor, with two metal points in contact with a sliver of germanium.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1956 was awarded jointly to William Bradford Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect"
