Shockley was one of the first recruits to
Bell Telephone Laboratories by
Mervin Kelly, who became director of research at the company in 1936 and focused on hiring
solid-state physicists. Executives at Bell Labs had theorized that
semiconductors may offer solid-state alternatives to the
vacuum tubes used throughout Bell's nationwide telephone system. Shockley conceived a number of designs based on copper-oxide semiconductor materials, and with
Walter Brattain's unsuccessful attempt to create a prototype in 1939. Shockley published a number of fundamental papers on solid-state physics in
Physical Review. In 1938, he received his first patent, "Electron Discharge Device", on
electron multipliers. This technology was incorporated inside the
ENIAC computer by 1945. In May 1942, he took leave from Bell Labs to become a research director at
Columbia University's Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Group. This involved devising methods for countering the tactics of submarines with improved
convoying techniques, optimizing
depth charge patterns, and so on. Shockley traveled frequently to
the Pentagon and Washington to meet high-ranking officers and government officials. In 1944, he organized a training program for
B-29 bomber pilots to use new
radar bomb sights. In late 1944, he took a three-month tour to bases around the world to assess the results. For this project, Secretary of War
Robert Patterson awarded Shockley the
Medal for Merit on October 17, 1946. Shockley was the first physicist to propose a
log-normal distribution to model the creation process for scientific research papers.
Invention of the transistor , Shockley
(center), and
Walter Brattain at Bell Labs, 1948 Shortly after the war ended in 1945, Bell Labs formed a solid-state physics group, led by Shockley and chemist Stanley Morgan, which included
John Bardeen,
Walter Brattain, physicist
Gerald Pearson, chemist Robert Gibney, electronics expert Hilbert Moore, and several technicians. Their assignment was to seek a solid-state alternative to fragile glass
vacuum tube amplifiers. First attempts were based on Shockley's ideas about using an external electrical field on a semiconductor to affect its conductivity. These experiments failed every time in all sorts of configurations and materials. The group was at a standstill until Bardeen suggested a theory that invoked
surface states that prevented the field from penetrating the semiconductor. The group changed its focus to study these surface states and they met almost daily to discuss the work. The group had excellent rapport and freely exchanged ideas. By the winter of 1946, they had enough results that Bardeen submitted a paper on the surface states to
Physical Review. Brattain started experiments to study the surface states through observations made while shining a bright light on the semiconductor's surface. This led to several more papers (one of them co-authored with Shockley), which estimated the density of the surface states to be more than enough to account for their failed experiments. The pace of the work picked up significantly when they started to surround point contacts between the semiconductor and the conducting wires with
electrolytes. Moore built a circuit that allowed them to vary the frequency of the input signal easily. Finally they began to get some evidence of power amplification when Pearson, acting on a suggestion by Shockley, put a voltage on a droplet of glycol borate placed across a
p–n junction. Bell Labs' attorneys soon discovered Shockley's field effect principle had been anticipated and devices based on it patented in 1930 by
Julius Lilienfeld, who filed his
MESFET-like patent in Canada on October 22, 1925. Although the patent appeared "breakable" (it could not work) the patent attorneys based one of its four patent applications only on the Bardeen-Brattain point contact design. Three others (submitted first) covered the electrolyte-based transistors with Bardeen, Gibney and Brattain as the inventors. Shockley's name was not on any of these patent applications. This angered Shockley, who thought his name should also be on the patents because the work was based on his field effect idea. He even made efforts to have the patent written only in his name, and told Bardeen and Brattain of his intentions. Shockley, angered by not being included on the patent applications, secretly continued his own work to build a different sort of transistor based on junctions instead of point contacts; he expected this kind of design would be more likely to be commercially viable. The point contact transistor, he believed, would prove to be fragile and difficult to manufacture. Shockley was also dissatisfied with certain parts of the explanation for how the point contact transistor worked and conceived of the possibility of
minority carrier injection. On February 13, 1948, another team member,
John N. Shive, built a point contact transistor with bronze contacts on the front and back of a thin wedge of
germanium, proving that
holes could diffuse through bulk germanium and not just along the surface as previously thought. Shive's invention sparked Shockley worked out a rather complete description of what he called the "sandwich" transistor, and a first
proof of principle was obtained on April 7, 1949. Meanwhile, Shockley worked on his book,
Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors, which was published as a 558-page treatise in 1950. The tome included Shockley's critical ideas of drift and diffusion and the differential equations that govern the flow of electrons in solid state crystals.
Shockley's diode equation is also described. This seminal work became the reference text for other scientists working to develop and improve new variants of the transistor and other devices based on semiconductors. This resulted in his invention of the
bipolar junction transistor, which was announced at a press conference on July 4, 1951. The ensuing publicity generated by the "invention of the transistor" often thrust Shockley to the fore, much to the chagrin of Bardeen and Brattain. Bell Labs management, however, consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Though Shockley would correct the record where reporters gave him sole credit for the invention, he eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor. Bardeen began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951. Brattain refused to work with Shockley further and was assigned to another group. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain had much to do with the development of the transistor beyond the first year after its invention. Shockley left Bell Labs around 1953 and took a job at Caltech. The company, a division of
Beckman Instruments, Inc., was the first establishment working on silicon semiconductor devices in what came to be known as
Silicon Valley. Shockley recruited brilliant employees to his company, but alienated them by undermining them relentlessly. "He may have been the worst manager in the history of electronics", according to his biographer Joel Shurkin. In late 1957, eight of Shockley's best researchers, who would come to be known as the "
traitorous eight", resigned after Shockley decided not to continue research into silicon-based semiconductors. A group of about thirty colleagues have met on and off since 1956 to reminisce about their time with Shockley, "the man who brought silicon to Silicon Valley", as the group's organizer said in 2002. == Racist and eugenicist views ==