Bill Shockley
Bill Shockley
Bill Shockley
Quite by accident, he and a colleague designed a nuclear reactor that had dire potential. In
1939, much of the physics community was taken by the growing advances toward fission
made by European scientists. Shockley and his friend, James Fisk, were assigned by the
labs to examine the potential for fission as an energy source. The men were given a small
room and lab equipment. One day, standing in the shower at home thinking about how to
produce a chain reaction, Shockley came up with an idea: "If you put the uranium in
chunks, separated lumps or something, the neutrons might be able to slow down...and not
get captured and then be able to hit the U-235." In two months, he and Fisk designed one of
the world's first nuclear reactors.
Their report went immediately to Washington. The government classified it right away,
even keeping it secret from its own scientists. The authorities fought any attempt by Fisk,
Shockley or the labs to take out a patent. Only after the war did the Manhattan Project
physicists learn of the reactor. Meanwhile they had needed to invent the same concepts
themselves.
Shockley may have saved thousands of lives without leaving his desk. When war broke out,
Morse was recruited to research munitions problems the Navy was having, mostly with its
depth charges. Shockley volunteered to join Morse's office, the Anti-Submarine Warfare
Operations Group. Under Morse's guidance, Shockley and his team solved the depth charge
problem and successful attacks on German U-boats increased by a factor of five. Shockley's
main weapon was the science of operations research, then largely ignored in the U.S., but
already recruited for the war effort by the British. He then went about changing the way the
Navy searched for submarines, again improving the kill-ratio. He devised tactics for the
Atlantic convoys to evade German bombers after determining statistically – and without
ever seeing either a convoy or a bomber – that the bombers did not carry radar.
Shockley eventually wound up in the Army Air Corps, helping train bomber crews in the
European theater. He became one of the highest ranking civilian scientists outside Los
Alamos, and was the keeper of some of America's most closely held secrets. He traveled all
over the world. By the war's end, he had essentially designed the training of all American
bomber crews and found ways of increasing their effectiveness even in bad weather. He
won the National Medal of Merit.
Despite his frenetic pace and importance, he was an unhappy man, even attempting suicide
once by playing Russian roulette with himself. He and Jean had two sons. To them he was a
distant, often psychologically cruel father. Little affection was given, and eventually, little
returned. His marriage began to crumble.
"I think we better call Shockley."
When the war ended, Shockley returned to Bell Labs, and began his rise through
management of what was then the best industrial laboratory in the world. He helped the labs
hire the best engineers and physicists he could find. His talent for picking talent was superb.
Walter Brattain already was in place at the labs. He and Shockley had tried to build a solid-
state amplifier to replace the ubiquitous vacuum tube before the war but failed. Shockley
then hired John Bardeen, a brilliant theorist from the University of Minnesota. They would
return to the search for the vacuum tubereplacement.
Shockley had theorized a device using a field effect, but, for reasons no one could figure
out, it didn't work. Bardeen went to work to find out why. On March 19, 1946, Bardeen had
his epiphany, a theory that explained the failure. He and Brattain immediately went to work
to build on that insight. Curiously, Shockley did not. Although he was administrative leader
of the team, he essentially went home to work on his own ideas, leaving Bardeen and
Brattain on their own. Big mistake.
The two men worked feverishly through the summer and autumn,
Shockley dropping by irregularly to see what they were doing,
making an occasional suggestion, aiming them in certain directions.
The breakthrough came in November and on December 16, 1947, Snuffy's, a favorite hang-out
for Bell Labs scientists in the
Brattain and Bardeen produced the point-contact transistor. That late 1940s
month came to be called "The Miracle Month" in Bell Labs lore.
Shockley was both proud of their accomplishment and furious that they had succeeded
where he had failed. A few weeks later, holed up in a hotel room
in Chicago, where he was attending the American Physical Society
convention, he leapfrogged the point-contact device by inventing
and designing the sandwich transistor. The sandwich transistor, and
Left to right: John Bardeen, the more advanced junction transistor that would be developed from
Bill Shockley, Charles H. it, were easier to mass produce and are still used today for special
Townes, Walter Brattain applications.
This put Bell Labs in a quandary. The administration knew something important had
happened, but Bardeen and Brattain had produced the first transistor on their own. Shockley
was head of their team and it seemed unseemly that he not get credit, especially since he
had produced an even better device. Hence, the lab ruled that every picture taken of the
inventors of the transistor must include William Shockley. He also would be the official
spokesman; Bardeen and Brattain were not interested in publicity. Shockley did not protest,
but the imposition by management quickly rankled his colleagues, both of whom had
already developed a healthy dislike for Shockley.