[1] Partly as a result of Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s, California's Silicon Valley became a hotbed of electronics innovation.

He recruited brilliant employees, but quickly alienated them with his autocratic and erratic management; they left and founded major companies in the industry.

[3][4][5][6][7][8] Shockley was born to American parents in London on February 13, 1910, and was raised in his family's hometown of Palo Alto, California, from the age of three.

His mother, May (née Bradford), grew up in the American West, graduated from Stanford University and became the first female U.S. Deputy mining surveyor.

[15] Shockley was one of the first recruits to Bell Labs by Mervin Kelly, who became director of research at the company in 1936 and focused on hiring solid-state physicists.

Shockley conceived a number of designs based on copper-oxide semiconductor materials, and with Walter Brattain unsuccessfully attempted to create a prototype in 1939.

In May 1942, he took leave from Bell Labs to become a research director at Columbia University's Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Group.

[19] This involved devising methods for countering the tactics of submarines with improved convoying techniques, optimizing depth charge patterns, and so on.

[21] In July 1945, the War Department asked Shockley to prepare a report on the question of probable casualties from an invasion of the Japanese mainland.

[22]This report influenced the decision of the United States to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which preceded the surrender of Japan.

[24] 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.

The group was at a standstill until Bardeen suggested a theory that invoked surface states that prevented the field from penetrating the semiconductor.

The pace of the work picked up significantly when they started to surround point contacts between the semiconductor and the conducting wires with electrolytes.

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.

[29] 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.

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.

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.

Though Shockley would correct the record where reporters gave him sole credit for the invention,[37] he eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor.

[43][44] In one well-known incident, he demanded lie detector tests to find the "culprit" after a company secretary suffered a minor cut.

[48] In the last two decades of his life, Shockley, who had no degree in genetics, became widely known for his extreme views on race and human intelligence, and his advocacy of eugenics.

[3][6] As described by his Los Angeles Times obituary, "He went from being a physicist with impeccable academic credentials to amateur geneticist, becoming a lightning rod whose views sparked campus demonstrations and a cascade of calumny".

[49] In a debate with psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing and on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr., Shockley argued, "My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and, thus, not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in the environment".

[50] Shockley was one of the race theorists who received money from the Pioneer Fund, and at least one donation to him came from its founder, the eugenicist Wickliffe Draper.

[54] The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Shockley as a white nationalist who failed to produce evidence for his eugenic theories amidst "near-universal acknowledgement that his work was that of a racist crank".

In one incident, the science society Sigma Xi, fearing violence, canceled a 1968 convocation in Brooklyn where Shockley was scheduled to speak.

The organization was founded according to its mission "solely for scientific and educational purposes related to human population and quality problems".

This funding was distributed through grants to Stanford University for the exploration of "research into the factors which affect genetic potential" and also directly to FREED.

[39][72] Although one of his sons earned a PhD at Stanford University and his daughter graduated from Radcliffe College, Shockley believed his children "represent a very significant regression ... my first wife – their mother – had not as high an academic-achievement standing as I had".

[26][73] Mountain Project, a web-based climbing guidebook, changed the route's name to "The Ceiling" in 2020 due to Shockley's eugenics controversies.

[76] However, Shockley's controversial views brought the Repository for Germinal Choice a degree of notoriety and may have discouraged other Nobel Prize winners from donating sperm.