The History of Silicon Valley — A Brief Summary (Part 2/3)

This is part 2 of my history of Silicon Valley series. If you haven’t read part 1, you can find it here.

Begin Part 2

William Shockley and Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory

After earning degrees in engineering from Caltech and MIT, the British inventor, William Shockley, and his two partners (John Bardeen and Walter Brattain) were working in New York at Bell Labs.

They were looking for an alternative to vacuum tubes for conducting electrons.

Can you guess what the alternative was? Silicon!

However, his partners made the discovery (which they named Transistor) while Shockley was out of the office… So they filed a patent immediately and didn’t include Shockley.

Shockley wasn’t known for being a nice person. So it’s no surprise he got very, very angry, shun his partners, and created his own transistor in 1951.

After getting the recognition he wanted, William Shockley left Bell Labs, left New York and returned home to Silicon Valley in 1956 (mainly because his mother was sick and lived in the area) to build Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.

Side note: Shockley and Beckman (his professor at Caltech)…