Shockley, William Bradford

Shockley, William Bradford, 1910-89, American physicist, b. London. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology (B.S., 1932) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1936). After directing antisubmarine research for the U.S. Navy during World War II, he returned to work at Bell Laboratories. There he and two colleagues, John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain, produced the first transistor in 1947; for this work they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. Shockley taught electrical engineering at Stanford from 1958 to 1975. In the late 1960s and 1970s he became the center of controversy when he lectured on his theory that blacks were intellectually inferior and, by reproducing faster than whites, were causing a retrogression in human evolution. Most social scientists took issue with his interpretation of gross intelligence quotient (IQ) scores because he made no allowance for cultural and social influences.

(born Feb. 13, 1910, London, Eng.—died Aug. 12, 1989, Palo Alto, Calif., U.S.) U.S. engineer and teacher. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He joined Bell Labs in 1936, where he began experiments that led to the development of the transistor. During World War II he was director of research for the U.S. Navy's Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group; later (1954–55) he was deputy director of the Defense Department's Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. He established the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory at Beckman Instruments in 1955. In 1956 he shared a Nobel Prize with John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain for their work at Bell Labs on the transistor. He taught at Stanford University (1958–74). From the late 1960s he earned notoriety for his outspoken and critical views on the intellectual capacity of blacks.

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• William Bradford Shockley, a British-born American physicist and Nobel Prize winner
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