Born Feb. 13, 1910, William Bradford Shockley was the son of a mining engineer and his mother a federal deputy surveyor of mineral lands. The couple was living in England on business at the time of Shockley's birth, and returned to California when the child was a toddler. Encouraged to study science both by his parents' professions and a neighbor who taught physics at Stanford, Shockley earned an undergraduate degree from CalTech in 1932, and a Ph.D. four years later at MIT. Leaving MIT, he went to work for Bell Labs, where he worked on quantum theory as it applied to the development of semiconductors. During WWII he worked on military projects, refining radar systems, returning to the study of semiconductors after the war's end.

In 1947 he and two colleagues invented the transistor. It was a piece of gold foil wrapped around a plastic knife, pressed against a block of germanium that had an electrical connection at its base. The transistor made vacuum tubes obsolete and the computer age possible. Before the development of the transistor, computers had been room-sized monstrous machines requiring huge refrigerators and containing hundreds or thousands of vacuum tubes, all of which were prone to breakdown and required constant checking.

Shockley and his colleagueswon the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956 for their discovery, sharing the $38,633 prize money. Shockley set up a semi-conductor lab at Beckman Instruments, and, then, his own Shockley Transistor Co. and went on to do a great deal of original research in electronics and allied fields. He still holds some 90 patents.

Shockley was appointed professor of engineering at Stanford University in 1963 where he taught until 1975. Teaching led him to an interest in eugenics, the study of heredity and breeding, and developed a theory which he called "dysgenics." Shockley was concerned about the future of the human race because, he said, people with low IQs had more children than those with higher IQs. His views became increasing based more on political issues than scientific data. Blacks, he pointed out, consistently score 10 to 20 points lower on their IQ tests than whites do. Shockley's theories were widely criticized in the public and the media, and his attempts to speak on college campuses were regularly disrupted with boos and catcalls.

After a 1980 ATLANTA CONSTITUTION article comparing his controversial proposal for sterilization of the "genetically disadvantaged" with World War II Nazi genetic experiments, Shockley sued the paper for libel and $1.25 million in damages. The jury found for Shockley, but awarded him only $1 in damages, and an appeal to the US Supreme Court was turned down in 1986.

Shockley publically linked his name with the Repository for Germinal Choice, which billed itself as a sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners and other high-IQ donors. This venture, along with his eugenic views, was not supported by his peers in the scientific community, most of whom felt that Shockley should be respected for his contributions to physics but that he should be viewed as a dangerous crank for his political stance.

Shockley died August 12, 1989 of prostate cancer at the age of 79.