Traitorous eight
William Shockley had in 1956 recruited a group of young Ph.D. graduates with the goal to develop and produce new semiconductor devices.
While Shockley had received a Nobel Prize in Physics and was an experienced researcher and teacher, his management of the group was authoritarian and unpopular.
In 1960, it became an incubator of Silicon Valley and was directly or indirectly involved in the creation of dozens of corporations, including Intel and AMD.
[5] Accordingly, Beckman agreed to create and fund a laboratory under the condition that its discoveries should be brought to mass production within two years.
[7] During 1955, Beckman and Shockley signed the deal,[8] bought licenses on all necessary patents for $25,000,[9] and selected the location in Mountain View, near Palo Alto, California.
[6] Though Shockley did recruit four PhD physicists, William W. Happ (from Raytheon Corporation)[10] George Smoot Horsley and Leopoldo B. Valdes (both from Bell Labs), and Richard Victor Jones (a fresh Berkeley graduate),[11] the location provided limited enticement for new employees.
[14][15] The newspaper campaign brought some three hundred responses, and fifteen people, including Gordon Moore and David Allison,[16] Shockley himself recruited at a meeting of the American Physical Society.
Shockley was a proponent of social technologies (which later led him to eugenics) and asked each candidate to pass a psychological test,[18] followed by an interview.
[32] Throughout 1956, most members of the lab were assembling and tuning the equipment, and "pure scientists" Hoerni and Noyce carried out individual applied research.
[33] After resettlement, he focused on fine-tuning Shockley diodes for mass production, and five employees, led by Noyce, continued the work on a field effect transistor for Beckman Instruments.
[35][36] According to Noyce and Moore, as well as David Brock and Joel Shurkin, the shift from bipolar transistors to Shockley diodes was unexpected.
[note 1] From early childhood he was prone to outbursts of unprovoked aggression,[43] which were suppressed only due to the internal discipline of his past working environment.
All phone calls were recorded,[48] and the staff was not allowed to share their results with each other, which was not feasible since they all worked in a small building.
[53] In March 1957, Kleiner, who was beyond Shockley's suspicions, asked permission ostensibly to visit an exhibition in Los Angeles.
[55] Arthur Rock and Alfred Coyle from Hayden, Stone & Co. became interested in the offer, believing that trainees of a Nobel laureate were destined to succeed.
[54] As a last resort, on May 29, 1957, a group led by Moore presented Arnold Beckman with an ultimatum: solve the "Shockley problem" or they would leave.
[57] In June 1957, Beckman finally put a manager between Shockley and the team, but by then seven key employees had already made their decision.
Coyle, a ruddy-faced Irishman with a fondness for ceremony, pulled out 10 newly minted $1 bills and laid them carefully on the table.
[68] He also combed through all records left by The Eight, basing patents, held as Shockley Labs' intellectual property, on any important ideas.
In 1960, with the help of a new team,[69] Shockley brought his own diode to serial production, but time had been lost, and competitors had already come close to the development of integrated circuits.
On July 23, 1961, Shockley was seriously injured in a car crash,[72] and after recovery left the company and returned to teaching at Stanford.
[75] We were all focused on the single goal of producing our first product, a double diffused silicon mesa transistor ... We were all very young (27 to 32), only a few years beyond our school days.
Most of the founders were married, busy starting their families and raising small children in addition to all the time and effort they were spending building Fairchild ...
– Jay T. Last, 2010[76] In November 1957, The Eight moved out of Grinich's garage[77] into a new, empty building on the border of Palo Alto and Mountain View.
Jay Last recalled (in 2007) that this event happened too early and turned former partners into ordinary employees, destroying the team spirit.
[90] In November 1960, Tom Bay, the Vice President of Marketing at Fairchild, accused Last of squandering money and demanded termination of Last's project of developing integrated circuits.
[93] In November 1965, the creators of integrated operational amplifiers Bob Widlar and David Talbert left for National Semiconductor.
[96] Blank, Grinich, Kleiner, Last, Hoerni, and Roberts set aside the past disagreements and financially supported the company of Moore and Noyce.
Grinich left Fairchild in 1968 for a short sabbatical[98] and then taught at UC Berkeley and Stanford, where he published the first comprehensive textbook on integrated circuits.
[109][110] In research, reporting, and popular lore related to Silicon Valley, the term "Fairchildren" has been used to refer to: One of the first articles to identify Fairchild as the parent of so many spin-offs appeared in Innovation Magazine in 1969.
