"[3] William Shockley received his undergraduate degree from Caltech and moved east to complete his PhD at MIT with a focus on physics.

Shockley had become convinced that the natural capabilities of silicon meant it would eventually replace germanium as the primary material for transistor construction.

[4][5] Shockley set about recruiting his first four PhD physicists: William W. Happ[6] who had previously worked on semiconductor devices at Raytheon,[7] George Smoot Horsley and Leopoldo B. Valdes from Bell Labs, and Richard Victor Jones, a recent Berkeley graduate.

This led to increasingly paranoid behavior; in one famed incident he was convinced that a secretary's cut finger was a plot to injure him and ordered lie detector tests on everyone in the company.

Fed up, the group broke ranks and sought support from Fairchild Camera and Instrument, an Eastern U.S. company with considerable military contracts.

[14] In 2014, Tech Crunch revisited Don Hoefler's 1971 article, claiming 92 public companies of 130 descendant listed firms were then worth over US$2.1 Trillion.

[15] Shockley never managed to make the four-layer diode a commercial success, in spite of eventually working out the technical details and entering production in the 1960s.

The introduction of integrated circuits allowed the multiple transistors needed to produce a switch to be placed on a single "chip", thereby nullifying the parts-count advantage of Shockley's design.