Shockley, William (1910-1989), an American physicist, was one of the inventors of the transistor. With John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, he received the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering the principles of electrical conduction in solids that make the transistor possible. Transistors control the flow of electric current in radios, television sets, computers, and almost every other kind of electronic equipment.
Shockley was born on Feb. 13, 1910, in London. He received a bachelor’s degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1932 and a Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. From 1936 to 1955, he worked as a physicist at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. He was a professor of engineering at Stanford University from 1963 to 1975. He died on Aug. 12, 1989.
In the 1960’s, Shockley began to promote eugenics and racist views. Eugenics is the idea or act of improving the human population through the selection of people to bear children based on their desirable inherited characteristics. Shockley was convinced that Black people were less intelligent than white people and that heredity, rather than environment, was solely responsible for determining intelligence. He believed that less intelligent people were reproducing more rapidly than more intelligent people and feared it would lead to a cultural decline. Therefore, Shockley proposed coercing people with low intelligence quotients (IQ’s) and certain other traits into undergoing sterilization. The scientific community distanced itself from Shockley for his continued promotion of these views. See Intelligence (The roles of heredity and environment).
