William Shockley

Did You Know?

• Shockley was homeschooled up to age eight due to his parents' dislike of public schools and his habit of violent tantrums.
• He learned physics at a young age from a neighbor who was a Stanford physics professor.
• Shockley's father, William Hillman Shockley, was a mining engineer who spoke eight languages.

Career and research

Mervin Kelly, who became Bell Labs' research director in 1936 and focused on hiring solid-state physicists, recruited William Shockley early on. Shockley joined Clinton Davisson's group in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Bell Labs executives believed semiconductors could replace the vacuum tubes used in the telephone network. Shockley came up with several designs using copper-oxide semiconductor materials, and in 1939 he and Walter Brattain tried—unsuccessfully—to build a prototype.

Shockley published key papers on solid-state physics in Physical Review and got his first patent, for an electron multiplier device, in 1938. World War II interrupted his earlier research; he worked on radar in Manhattan and, in early 1942, pioneered delay-line memory at Bell Labs. This memory cost one-hundredth as much as competing vacuum-tube memory and was about as fast, and it was used in the ENIAC computer by 1945. In May 1942, Shockley left Bell Labs to become a research director at Columbia University's Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Group, where he developed methods to counter submarines, including better convoy techniques and depth-charge patterns, and frequently traveled to Washington to meet with military leaders.

In 1944, he organized a training program for B-29 pilots on new radar bomb sights and later toured bases worldwide to evaluate it. Secretary of War Robert Patterson awarded him the Medal for Merit on October 17, 1946. In July 1945, the War Department asked Shockley to estimate casualties from an invasion of Japan; his report influenced the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shockley was also the first physicist to propose using a log-normal distribution to model how scientific research papers are produced.

Racist and eugenicist views

After leaving his post as director of Shockley Semiconductor in April 1960, William Shockley moved to Stanford University, where he became the Alexander M. Poniatoff Professor of Engineering and Applied Science in 1963, a role he kept until retiring in 1975. During his final two decades, Shockley—who had no formal training in genetics—gained notoriety for his controversial beliefs about race and intelligence and his support for eugenics. His obituary in the Los Angeles Times described his shift from a respected physicist to an amateur geneticist who attracted protests and criticism.

He believed that higher birth rates among those he considered less intelligent would lower average intelligence and harm civilization, and he asserted that Black people were genetically and intellectually inferior to white people. Biographer Joel Shurkin observed that Shockley had almost no interaction with Black people for most of his life. Shockley received funding from the Pioneer Fund, including a donation from its founder, eugenicist Wickliffe Draper.

He suggested paying people with IQs below 100 to undergo voluntary sterilization, offering $1,000 for each point under 100, a proposal that caused the University of Leeds to retract an honorary degree offer. In 1973, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee professor Edgar G. Epps stated that Shockley’s views invited racist interpretations. Appearing on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. in 1974, Shockley claimed his research showed that the intellectual and social shortcomings of Black Americans were primarily hereditary and racial, and therefore not significantly fixable through environmental changes.

Personal life

Shockley married Jean Bailey in August 1933 at age 23; the couple had two sons and a daughter. He separated from her in 1953 and married Emily Lanning, a psychiatric nurse, in 1955; she helped him with some of his theories. Although one of his sons earned a PhD at Stanford and his daughter graduated from Radcliffe College, Shockley believed his children represented a significant regression because his first wife had not as high an academic-achievement standing as he had.

Shockley was an accomplished rock climber, often going to the Shawangunks in the Hudson River Valley; his 1953 route known as "Shockley's Ceiling" is a classic climb, though its name has been changed to "The Ceiling" due to his eugenics controversies. He was popular as a speaker, lecturer, and amateur magician, once producing a bouquet of roses at the end of an address before the American Physical Society. He was known for elaborate practical jokes and had a longtime hobby of raising ant colonies.

Shockley donated sperm to the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank founded by Robert Klark Graham; Shockley was the only donor to publicly acknowledge his involvement, and his controversial views brought the bank notoriety. He was unhappy in his life and was often psychologically and sometimes physically abusive toward his sons, reportedly playing Russian roulette on himself as part of a suicide attempt. He died of prostate cancer on August 12, 1989, in Stanford, California, at age 79, estranged from most friends and family except his second wife; his children learned of his death by reading his obituary. He is buried in Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, California.

Publications

Shockley published "On the Statistics of Individual Variations of Productivity in Research Laboratories" in 1957. On heredity, dysgenics, and social issues, he wrote numerous works including "Is Quality of US Population Declining" (1965), "Possible Transfer of Metallurgical and Astronomical Approaches to Problem of Environment versus Ethnic Heredity" (1966), and "Population Control or Eugenics" (1966). He produced a 1967 manuscript titled "The Entrenched Dogmatism of Inverted Liberals" from which major portions were read in lectures.

In 1968 he presented "Proposed Research to Reduce Racial Aspects of the Environment-Heredity Uncertainty" before the National Academy of Science and issued a "Ten Point Position Statement on Human Quality Problems." He released a press statement in 1969 titled "An Analysis Leading to a Recommendation Concerning Inquiry into Eugenic Legislation." His 1970 work "A 'Try Simplest Cases' Approach to the Heredity-Poverty-Crime Problem" appeared in a volume edited by V. L. Allen.

He proposed a resolution before the National Academy of Sciences in 1970 and published "New Methodology to Reduce the Environment-Heredity Uncertainty About Dysgenics" that year. In 1971 he published "Hardy-Weinberg Law Generalized to Estimate Hybrid Variance for Negro Populations" and "Dysgenics – A Social Problem Evaded by the Illusion of Infinite Plasticity of Human Intelligence?" He wrote "Models, Mathematics, and the Moral Obligation to Diagnose the Origin of Negro IQ Deficits" (1971) and "Negro IQ Deficit: Failure of a 'Malicious Coincidence' Model Warrants New Research Proposals" (1971).

In 1972 he published "Dysgenics, Geneticity, Raceology: A Challenge to the Intellectual Responsibility of Educators" and "A Debate Challenge: Geneticity Is 80% for White Identical Twins' I.Q.'s."