William Shockley

Shockley, British-American physicist. Born on February 13, 1910 in London, England. Shockley, the son of a mining engineer, graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1932 and worked in technology at Bell Laboratories after receiving a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. Shockley and collaborators Bardin and Bratton stumbled on transistor effects in their research work. He shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with Badin and Bratton for his research on semiconductors and the discovery of transistor effects. In 1955, Shockley served as research director of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the U.S. Department of Defense, and in 1963 he served as professor of engineering science at Stanford University.