William Shockley: Creator of the Electronic Age

Talk about William Shockley, a significant scientist in history

William Shockley was one of the most significant and reviled scientists of the 20th century – he was the founding father of Silicon Valley and twice featured on the cover of Time magazine. Half a century ago this year Shockley won a Nobel Prize for inventing the transistor, upon which almost everything that makes the modern world is based. Little has affected history as much as this device, developed along with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories in the mid-1940s. But William Shockley is remembered more for one of the most vicious controversies in modern science. His campaigning about race, intelligence and genetics saw him donating to the Nobel Prize sperm bank, being vilified on national TV and ultimately destroyed his reputation. Drawing upon unique access to the colossal private Shockley archives, veteran technology historian and journalist Joel N Shurkin gives an unflinching account of how such promise ended in such ignominy.

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