Today, 115 years ago, on February 13, 1910 (Calendar 4 January 1910), was born William Shackley, the inventor of transistor tubes. William Shackley, British-American physicist. Born on February 13, 1910 in London, England. Shackley was the son of a mining engineer, graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1932 and worked in the Bell Laboratory after obtaining a doctoral degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. Shackley and collaborators Patten and Braton worked on the accidental crystalline effect in their research work. For their research on semiconductors and discovery of the crystalline effect, Bartin and Braton shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics of the year. In 1955, Shackley served as director of the U.S. Department of Defense Arms Systems Assessment Research Group, and