> The point contact transistor effect was then demonstrated to management at Bell Labs by Brattain and Bardeen on Christmas Eve in 1947. Shockley wasn’t pleased that to have learned of the discovery over the phone, and he was even less pleased that he was left off the patent application. Nevertheless, he continued his own work which resulted in his invention of the junction transistor. The patent was filed on the 26th of June in 1948, and the first proof of principle was obtained on the 7th of April in 1949. This time around, Shockley immediately published his findings in the Bell Labs Technical Journal.
In The Idea Factory this chain of events is described a little differently. Maybe the author wants to cast Shockley in a bad light, but this is the timeline it lays out:
1. Bardeen and Brattain invent the point contact transistor.
2. Shockley spends a night in a hotel room inventing the much better junction transistor as an evolution on the point contact transistor, out of spite of being excluded.
3. Shockley keeps this invention secret, in contrast to typical Bell Labs protocol.
4. At a meeting, a group at Bell Labs is close to stumbling onto the invention of the junction transistor as part of solving issues with the point contact transistor.
5. Shockley was in that meeting and whips out his schematics for the junction transistor to retain credit for its invention.
Implied is that anyone at Bell Labs could have invented it, given some time. Only Shockley could have done it during a hotel room night, some time before people even realised it was needed.
While the point-contact transistor has been patented by Bardeen and Brattain, "invent" is not the most appropriate word because they have discovered experimentally by sheer luck the transistor effect between two point contacts, without having any prior idea that their experiments will result in such an effect.
The Bell Labs team was indeed searching how to make a semiconductor triode (the word transistor has been coined after the discovery of the point-contact transistor).
However they had expected that they would find a method to make a device similar to the metal-semiconductor or metal-insulator-semiconductor field-effect transistors that had been invented by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925 and 1928 (Lilienfeld had never succeeded to make them reproducibly, because by his time the role of impurities in semiconductors was not understood, so he was not aware about the extreme requirements for fabricating reproducible semiconductor devices).
Moreover, Shockley cannot have kept "secret" the bipolar junction transistor invented by him, except perhaps for at most a few weeks, if he had felt any reason to verify his computations before making them public, to be certain that his new theory is correct.
Less than half of year after the discovery of the transistor effect by Bardeen and Brattain, both Bardeen with Brattain and Shockley have filed almost simultaneously 2 patents, for their transistors. As normal, the patents have been assigned to the Bell Labs and the filings must have been prepared some time before that, together with the legal department of the company.
In the real timeline there is no time left for "secrecy". Shockley certainly has not kept any useful information for himself, because the theory published by him almost immediately is what has taught the first few generations of engineers specializing in semiconductor devices, leading to an explosive growth of the industry.
The BJT invented by Shockley has been the basis of the semiconductor industry, while the point-contact transistor has remained a historical curiosity. Point-contact transistors have been used for a few years only because the first junction transistors were too big, so they could not be used at radio frequencies. However the size problem has been solved quickly, so the use of point-contact transistors has been abandoned.
The only reason why the discovery of the transistor effect in point-contact transistors is important is because this has made Shockley think about which is the cause of the transistor effect, making him develop his theory that he has published very soon, first in abbreviated form in 1949 in the "Bell System Technical Journal", then in 1950 in his book "Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors".
Now when Shockley is mentioned everybody first comments that even if he has been a genius physicist in other aspects he was a stupid human being. Both aspects are of course true and it is not at all unusual for humans to do both very good things and very bad things. However his stupidity did not really have any harmful effects, besides many people feeling insulted by him, while his theoretical work, which has taught so many engineers how to do their jobs, remains a really important heritage, which has greatly contributed to human progress.
I still think that the junction transistor was an evolutionary step from the junction diode. Once you have a working diode, adding a third terminal to control the depletion zone seems like such a natural thing to do.
The natural thing about controlling the depletion zone is a field-effect transistor. That is why FETs, both metal-semiconductor FETs (with Shottky barrrier at the gate) and metal-insulator-semiconductor transistors have already been invented long before WWII, in 1925 and 1928, by Julius Lilienfeld (who has never succeeded to fabricate them, because the need and the means for controlling impurities were not known at that time).
The fact that you can control the current through a depleted region by injection of minority carriers has never occurred to anyone before Shockley, who has thought about this only because he has searched for an explanation of the weird effect discovered by chance by Bardeen and Brattain when experimenting with multiple point contacts to a semiconductor crystal.
So the discovery of the bipolar junction transistor had nothing easy and natural about it.
The sequence of events at the Bell Laboratories has been:
1. The need of detector diodes for radar signals during WWII has lead to the development of growing crystals of germanium and silicon that were free from impurities, unlike any material that has ever existed before.
2. After WWII, using the materials produced by the radar research, i.e. pure germanium crystals, Bardeen, Brattain and other colleagues have made experiments with the purpose of discovering a method for making semiconductor triodes like those invented by Lilienfeld, i.e. FETs.
3. The experiments for making FETs have failed (a method of making FETs has been invented only a few years later, also by William Shockley). Nevertheless, during the experiments a weird unexplained effect has been discovered, which was named as the transistor effect (the name is not very appropriate, because a transistor is not a trans-resistor, but a trans-conductor, but that was not understood at the beginning).
4. Shockley has searched for an explanation of the origin of the transistor effect. This has lead to a theory of the semiconductor P-N junction.
5. After understanding how semiconductor P-N junctions really work and which is the role of the minority charge carriers in their properties, Shockley has invented first the bipolar junction transistor (BJT) in 1948 and then the junction field-effect transistor (JFET) in 1951, which have been the most important semiconductor devices for about a quarter of a century, until the improvements in the fabrication technology of the MOS transistors have made MOSFETs the most important semiconductor devices.
Moreover, by the time of the discovery of the transistor effect, there were no junction diodes. The fabrication of junction diodes has begun later, as a byproduct of the bipolar transistor technology.
Before transistors, there were point-contact diodes for radio frequencies, made with silicon, germanium, galena and many other semiconductor crystals, and also rectifier diodes made with selenium or copper oxide.
The theory of these diodes was not understood well at that time, but they are metal-semiconductor diodes, i.e. Schottky diodes, not junction diodes. Shottky had given a theory of the metal-semiconductor diodes, but the theory was not helpful for designing such diodes, because it depended on material parameters that were not known at that time, so all practical diodes had been discovered empirically.
Shockley has been the first to give a good theory of the junction diodes, after the discovery of the transistor effect by Bardeen and Brattain. With the Shockley theory, you could design P-N junction diodes, by controlling the impurity levels in semiconductor crystals (instead of searching experimentally for random metal-semiconductor pairs with rectifying properties, like before his theory).
I find it a sad thing that often great achievements and ruthlessness go hand in hand. “Hard times create strong men and strong men create good times” is a famous quote. For example, it applies to Arnold Schwarzenegger since his father apparently mentally and physically abused Arnold[1], as well as for Elon Musk’s father for whom it is well documented he is a piece of work. If you read a lot about founders then this is a recurring theme. Why else would you work like a maniac your whole life? You don’t need a successful company to have a happy life.
There have also been studies that people tend to leash out to people below them if they feel that someone above them leashes out on them. This “displacement behavior” is a form of stress relieve. Monkeys do it too, and also there it is a form of stress relieve. It sort of makes sense right? You feel shit so then the easy solution is just to tell someone else that he/she is shit. You feel a bit better about yourself and all is good. Apart from the poor person (or monkey) who receives the abuse.
So on the one hand, we want great men who produce good times, who solve difficult problems (Elon) or who inspire people (Arnold). But on the other hand I wish no child to have a tough childhood like that. That’s life I guess.
One thing about Shockley. The blog mentions Shockley’s funeral. What the blog doesn’t mention is why there was no funeral. His wife thought nobody would come anyway so decided to not hold the ceremony. A sad ending. I wonder how his parents were and what would have become of him if things would have been a bit different. Maybe he would have been smart and emphatic?
[1]: Although many people don’t know this, Arnold can be very ruthless. Read about his early years and his relationships for more info.
In Shockley's case we have the benefit of seeing his whole life, from end to end. If for example a person loses a job, that could be a fluke; that could be due to anything. I would draw next to no conclusions from a person losing a job one time. But if we can see their whole career at a glance, and notice that person was fired 15 times in 40 years, that's a pattern. We can say that's out of the ordinary, that doesn't happen to the average working person. The record speaks for itself: this person must have had some quality that made his employers want to fire him.
Shockley was like this. Repeatedly in his life we see this pattern of people scrambling to get away from working with, or under, him. It's unusual for people to dislike someone that much: that's not common. If it was one anonymous guy over his whole career lodging a complaint, we might ignore it. But so many people voted to not be around Shockley, with their feet and with their employment. That's not common for a scientist, Democrat, Republican, entrepreneur, or anyone really: there must have been some unpleasant quality about Shockley that made people not want to be around him, as this pattern repeated over his whole life shows.
He wasn't good at the abusive boss dynamic I think, there's plenty of terrible bosses and terrible tech companies out there that continue to chew up workers and some even come back, because the abusive dynamics are very well done. All he needed was getting better at it.
> I find it a sad thing that often great achievements and ruthlessness go hand in hand.
That may be true (plenty of examples), but it may also be an outlier. It might be more common for talented individuals to work cooperatively, in a way that leads to breakthroughs, but without anyone trying to steal all the credit. I emphasize this is just a theory, in a field that cannot be reduced to science.
I've met many talented people over decades, in effective teams, but worked with only one classic martinet -- Steve Jobs. To hear Steve tell it, he was the reason for Apple's success. But he didn't design anything -- he was a salesman, not an engineer. In fairness, his incompetent replacements were in every way worse.
This thread is perfectly timed. We're about to see another martinet try to steal credit for the accomplishments of others, while denying responsibility for errors along the way.
I don't see why Elon should be in the category of strong men created by hard times who produce good times. It seems like all he did was fail upwards until he was rich enough to provide funding to, yes, some good projects. But nothing he's actually had a direct hand has really been successful.
If anything, now that he's (seemingly) an incompetent president of the US, he's likely to create bad times.
You can say many things about Elon and I’d probably agree with lots of them, especially regarding the near past, but he did build at least two organizations which have changed or are actively and visibly changing the world for the better. Funding came because of his resilience and perseverance, not in spite of his other traits.
Or, to quote a classic, he was smart and got shit done, for about two decades.
Which ones are those? PayPal (he didn't run it)? Tesla (it turned to shit when he ran it)? SpaceX (he didn't run it)? Twitter (it turned to shit when he ran it)?
What period in Tesla’s history are you identifying as “turned to shit”? Seems like they’ve been on a continuous upward trajectory and he’s been at the helm nearly the whole time. When he took over, they had no products, no sales, no manufacturing. He’s been in charge since then, during which they built several factories, launched several models, and sold several million cars.
He’s obviously not running the place day to day all the time, but I don’t see a period of decline where you could point and say “that’s when Elon came in and screwed it up.”
I’m very much unconvinced by the “hard times strong men good times weak men hard times” cycle. It seems like something people come up with to justify their bad behavior, or the bad behavior of people they admire. Do “great men” actually come from difficult backgrounds at above the background rate? Or do we just tend to notice the ones who do?
>> I find it a sad thing that often great achievements and ruthlessness go hand in hand. “Hard times create strong men and strong men create good times” is a famous quote.
I wonder if this applies to computing where in the early days RAM and clock cycles were limited so programmers and engineers had to be more creative and do more for less, where now it's just buy another GB RAM stick for $50USD and try again.
I remember a youtube video with bwk (Brian Kernighan) and he was saying that when they were doing UNIX and computing in the 70s it was easy for them as they had all the low hanging fruit to pick where now you have to climb higher to get the fruit?
The historical former building stood unchanged until 5-10 years ago. There was a historical plaque on that building. It has been demolished and replaced by a nameless large 5-story office building.
Since I cant comment on the article directly, some corrections:
391 South San Antonio Road should be 391 San Antonio Road. The former is in a different city. You can see some diode sculptures outside the correct address (now a much larger building).
Similarly, "844 South Charleston Road" doesn't even exist - I suspect the author meant 844 East Charleston Road, which is near the Shockley Lab building.
Appreciated. I will update within the next few days. If you’d like an attribution, I can post your username here as the source, otherwise it’ll be “a commenter on HN”
While the article is reasonably complete, it is unbalanced, because it insists much more on the unpleasant personality of William Shockley than on his decisive contributions to the development of the semiconductor industry.
The conclusion of the article is correct that besides his own contributions to the theory of semiconductor devices his second great, even if unintended, achievement was hiring truly the best people, but then annoying them enough so that they have left and founded Fairchild Semiconductor, from where some of them have gone later to create many other of the most important companies of Silicon Valley.
However Shockley has contributed with much more than the invention of the bipolar junction transistor. His invention of the Shockley diode was not very important, because the PNPN switch had already been invented at Bell Labs 3 years earlier, in 1952, by Jewell J. Ebers. The innovation of Shockley was only to notice that a PNPN switch does not need control electrodes to be switched on, because it can be switched on by either the output voltage or by light, therefore it can be made as a diode instead of a tetrode, like previously.
More important has been that Shockley has invented not only the bipolar junction transistor (BJT) in 1948, but also the junction field-effect transistor (JFET) in 1951. For many decades these 2 have been the most important semiconductor devices, until the technology has progressed sufficiently to allow the control of the oxide-silicon interface well enough to allow the fabrication of MOS transistors (which had been invented well before WWII, but nobody knew how to make them).
Even more important is that he has published detailed theories about how the BJTs and the JFETs function, which allowed anyone to design such semiconductor devices.
These theories of the semiconductor transistors conceived by Shockley have been what has really started the semiconductor industry. The previous discovery of the point-contact transistor by Bardeen and Brattain has been more or less accidental and they did not understand how it works. Without the theory of Shockley none of the quick progresses from the years following 1948 would have existed.
It does note his achievements, but had the man had any charisma at all, Silicon Valley might not have been. That the man was repellent is pivotal to the founding of Fairchild and thus all of the fairchildren.
"Greatness" and "repels people so hard that nobody wants to work with him" are not the same thing. Greatness does not require being that abhorrent to others.
Wild that people think only very specific human beings could have done this, there were multiple people working on the same problems, one of them was going to invent the thing, he wasn't the only genius around.
So much so there were plenty of others coming on his wake, creating and contributing even more to the field.
My father met several times Schockley in the 50-1960
He was a semi conductor engineer at Thomson-CSF in France (now ST Microelectronics). He made the first french diodes and transistors in the late 1950 in Grenoble.
Thomson-CSF had a patent agreement with Bell Labs to make transistors.
Part of the agreement was an annual consulting session with Schockley to exchange about manufacturing diodes and transistors. My father never spoke about Schockley's grumpiness.
I wonder if he held the same utility function for the entirety of his life, because the beginning and end of his life is quite dismal. Not one bit of reflection in his life seemed to change his tone.
Look at the picture, you can notice who's shockley by just observing their facial expression. The cold-and-smart-than-you shockley in the middle. Shockley's personality becomes his mortal enemy, but that personality is also ncessary for his achievement.
If strength cannot become your weakness, than it's just mediocrity.
I think it’s a balance. You do need to be an asshole sometimes to get things done. But you don’t need to be an asshole all the time. It’s an easy excuse to say you need to be a prick because otherwise you cannot do your great achievements. It’s a false dichotomy. Even Einstein had friends.
Hopefully by now everyone knows the "crazy feminist lady" picture, which was a still frame from a pretty normal conversation where she wasn't even really supporting the feminist side that much, but got spread around the Internet by anti-feminists for years.
The picture is great. The senior manager on the right has a bit of a grimace in realizing yet again he'll need to smooth over Shockley's antagonism. The guy on the left has more of a smile and nod, and everything will be okay, type attitude.
> The point contact transistor effect was then demonstrated to management at Bell Labs by Brattain and Bardeen on Christmas Eve in 1947. Shockley wasn’t pleased that to have learned of the discovery over the phone, and he was even less pleased that he was left off the patent application. Nevertheless, he continued his own work which resulted in his invention of the junction transistor. The patent was filed on the 26th of June in 1948, and the first proof of principle was obtained on the 7th of April in 1949. This time around, Shockley immediately published his findings in the Bell Labs Technical Journal.
In The Idea Factory this chain of events is described a little differently. Maybe the author wants to cast Shockley in a bad light, but this is the timeline it lays out:
1. Bardeen and Brattain invent the point contact transistor.
2. Shockley spends a night in a hotel room inventing the much better junction transistor as an evolution on the point contact transistor, out of spite of being excluded.
3. Shockley keeps this invention secret, in contrast to typical Bell Labs protocol.
4. At a meeting, a group at Bell Labs is close to stumbling onto the invention of the junction transistor as part of solving issues with the point contact transistor.
5. Shockley was in that meeting and whips out his schematics for the junction transistor to retain credit for its invention.
Implied is that anyone at Bell Labs could have invented it, given some time. Only Shockley could have done it during a hotel room night, some time before people even realised it was needed.
While the point-contact transistor has been patented by Bardeen and Brattain, "invent" is not the most appropriate word because they have discovered experimentally by sheer luck the transistor effect between two point contacts, without having any prior idea that their experiments will result in such an effect.
The Bell Labs team was indeed searching how to make a semiconductor triode (the word transistor has been coined after the discovery of the point-contact transistor).
However they had expected that they would find a method to make a device similar to the metal-semiconductor or metal-insulator-semiconductor field-effect transistors that had been invented by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925 and 1928 (Lilienfeld had never succeeded to make them reproducibly, because by his time the role of impurities in semiconductors was not understood, so he was not aware about the extreme requirements for fabricating reproducible semiconductor devices).
Moreover, Shockley cannot have kept "secret" the bipolar junction transistor invented by him, except perhaps for at most a few weeks, if he had felt any reason to verify his computations before making them public, to be certain that his new theory is correct.
Less than half of year after the discovery of the transistor effect by Bardeen and Brattain, both Bardeen with Brattain and Shockley have filed almost simultaneously 2 patents, for their transistors. As normal, the patents have been assigned to the Bell Labs and the filings must have been prepared some time before that, together with the legal department of the company.
In the real timeline there is no time left for "secrecy". Shockley certainly has not kept any useful information for himself, because the theory published by him almost immediately is what has taught the first few generations of engineers specializing in semiconductor devices, leading to an explosive growth of the industry.
The BJT invented by Shockley has been the basis of the semiconductor industry, while the point-contact transistor has remained a historical curiosity. Point-contact transistors have been used for a few years only because the first junction transistors were too big, so they could not be used at radio frequencies. However the size problem has been solved quickly, so the use of point-contact transistors has been abandoned.
The only reason why the discovery of the transistor effect in point-contact transistors is important is because this has made Shockley think about which is the cause of the transistor effect, making him develop his theory that he has published very soon, first in abbreviated form in 1949 in the "Bell System Technical Journal", then in 1950 in his book "Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors".
Now when Shockley is mentioned everybody first comments that even if he has been a genius physicist in other aspects he was a stupid human being. Both aspects are of course true and it is not at all unusual for humans to do both very good things and very bad things. However his stupidity did not really have any harmful effects, besides many people feeling insulted by him, while his theoretical work, which has taught so many engineers how to do their jobs, remains a really important heritage, which has greatly contributed to human progress.
In case people are not aware, Beckman had invented the pH meter a few years before Hewlett & Packard came up with their audio test equipment.
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_1503
Just like the one jn my collection :)
Fun fact, these two very similarly named diodes are completely different
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley_diode
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schottky_diode
I mistook Shockley diode for a Schottky diode until I looked it up
Schottky diodes are still useful today. Shockley diodes are not.
I still think that the junction transistor was an evolutionary step from the junction diode. Once you have a working diode, adding a third terminal to control the depletion zone seems like such a natural thing to do.
Nope.
The natural thing about controlling the depletion zone is a field-effect transistor. That is why FETs, both metal-semiconductor FETs (with Shottky barrrier at the gate) and metal-insulator-semiconductor transistors have already been invented long before WWII, in 1925 and 1928, by Julius Lilienfeld (who has never succeeded to fabricate them, because the need and the means for controlling impurities were not known at that time).
The fact that you can control the current through a depleted region by injection of minority carriers has never occurred to anyone before Shockley, who has thought about this only because he has searched for an explanation of the weird effect discovered by chance by Bardeen and Brattain when experimenting with multiple point contacts to a semiconductor crystal.
So the discovery of the bipolar junction transistor had nothing easy and natural about it.
The sequence of events at the Bell Laboratories has been:
1. The need of detector diodes for radar signals during WWII has lead to the development of growing crystals of germanium and silicon that were free from impurities, unlike any material that has ever existed before.
2. After WWII, using the materials produced by the radar research, i.e. pure germanium crystals, Bardeen, Brattain and other colleagues have made experiments with the purpose of discovering a method for making semiconductor triodes like those invented by Lilienfeld, i.e. FETs.
3. The experiments for making FETs have failed (a method of making FETs has been invented only a few years later, also by William Shockley). Nevertheless, during the experiments a weird unexplained effect has been discovered, which was named as the transistor effect (the name is not very appropriate, because a transistor is not a trans-resistor, but a trans-conductor, but that was not understood at the beginning).
4. Shockley has searched for an explanation of the origin of the transistor effect. This has lead to a theory of the semiconductor P-N junction.
5. After understanding how semiconductor P-N junctions really work and which is the role of the minority charge carriers in their properties, Shockley has invented first the bipolar junction transistor (BJT) in 1948 and then the junction field-effect transistor (JFET) in 1951, which have been the most important semiconductor devices for about a quarter of a century, until the improvements in the fabrication technology of the MOS transistors have made MOSFETs the most important semiconductor devices.
Moreover, by the time of the discovery of the transistor effect, there were no junction diodes. The fabrication of junction diodes has begun later, as a byproduct of the bipolar transistor technology.
Before transistors, there were point-contact diodes for radio frequencies, made with silicon, germanium, galena and many other semiconductor crystals, and also rectifier diodes made with selenium or copper oxide.
The theory of these diodes was not understood well at that time, but they are metal-semiconductor diodes, i.e. Schottky diodes, not junction diodes. Shottky had given a theory of the metal-semiconductor diodes, but the theory was not helpful for designing such diodes, because it depended on material parameters that were not known at that time, so all practical diodes had been discovered empirically.
Shockley has been the first to give a good theory of the junction diodes, after the discovery of the transistor effect by Bardeen and Brattain. With the Shockley theory, you could design P-N junction diodes, by controlling the impurity levels in semiconductor crystals (instead of searching experimentally for random metal-semiconductor pairs with rectifying properties, like before his theory).
I find it a sad thing that often great achievements and ruthlessness go hand in hand. “Hard times create strong men and strong men create good times” is a famous quote. For example, it applies to Arnold Schwarzenegger since his father apparently mentally and physically abused Arnold[1], as well as for Elon Musk’s father for whom it is well documented he is a piece of work. If you read a lot about founders then this is a recurring theme. Why else would you work like a maniac your whole life? You don’t need a successful company to have a happy life.
There have also been studies that people tend to leash out to people below them if they feel that someone above them leashes out on them. This “displacement behavior” is a form of stress relieve. Monkeys do it too, and also there it is a form of stress relieve. It sort of makes sense right? You feel shit so then the easy solution is just to tell someone else that he/she is shit. You feel a bit better about yourself and all is good. Apart from the poor person (or monkey) who receives the abuse.
So on the one hand, we want great men who produce good times, who solve difficult problems (Elon) or who inspire people (Arnold). But on the other hand I wish no child to have a tough childhood like that. That’s life I guess.
One thing about Shockley. The blog mentions Shockley’s funeral. What the blog doesn’t mention is why there was no funeral. His wife thought nobody would come anyway so decided to not hold the ceremony. A sad ending. I wonder how his parents were and what would have become of him if things would have been a bit different. Maybe he would have been smart and emphatic?
[1]: Although many people don’t know this, Arnold can be very ruthless. Read about his early years and his relationships for more info.
In Shockley's case we have the benefit of seeing his whole life, from end to end. If for example a person loses a job, that could be a fluke; that could be due to anything. I would draw next to no conclusions from a person losing a job one time. But if we can see their whole career at a glance, and notice that person was fired 15 times in 40 years, that's a pattern. We can say that's out of the ordinary, that doesn't happen to the average working person. The record speaks for itself: this person must have had some quality that made his employers want to fire him.
Shockley was like this. Repeatedly in his life we see this pattern of people scrambling to get away from working with, or under, him. It's unusual for people to dislike someone that much: that's not common. If it was one anonymous guy over his whole career lodging a complaint, we might ignore it. But so many people voted to not be around Shockley, with their feet and with their employment. That's not common for a scientist, Democrat, Republican, entrepreneur, or anyone really: there must have been some unpleasant quality about Shockley that made people not want to be around him, as this pattern repeated over his whole life shows.
He wasn't good at the abusive boss dynamic I think, there's plenty of terrible bosses and terrible tech companies out there that continue to chew up workers and some even come back, because the abusive dynamics are very well done. All he needed was getting better at it.
> I find it a sad thing that often great achievements and ruthlessness go hand in hand.
That may be true (plenty of examples), but it may also be an outlier. It might be more common for talented individuals to work cooperatively, in a way that leads to breakthroughs, but without anyone trying to steal all the credit. I emphasize this is just a theory, in a field that cannot be reduced to science.
I've met many talented people over decades, in effective teams, but worked with only one classic martinet -- Steve Jobs. To hear Steve tell it, he was the reason for Apple's success. But he didn't design anything -- he was a salesman, not an engineer. In fairness, his incompetent replacements were in every way worse.
This thread is perfectly timed. We're about to see another martinet try to steal credit for the accomplishments of others, while denying responsibility for errors along the way.
Your perspective is irreplaceable on this matter. Thank you for sharing it; I had feared you had given up on HN.
I don't see why Elon should be in the category of strong men created by hard times who produce good times. It seems like all he did was fail upwards until he was rich enough to provide funding to, yes, some good projects. But nothing he's actually had a direct hand has really been successful.
If anything, now that he's (seemingly) an incompetent president of the US, he's likely to create bad times.
You can say many things about Elon and I’d probably agree with lots of them, especially regarding the near past, but he did build at least two organizations which have changed or are actively and visibly changing the world for the better. Funding came because of his resilience and perseverance, not in spite of his other traits.
Or, to quote a classic, he was smart and got shit done, for about two decades.
Which ones are those? PayPal (he didn't run it)? Tesla (it turned to shit when he ran it)? SpaceX (he didn't run it)? Twitter (it turned to shit when he ran it)?
What period in Tesla’s history are you identifying as “turned to shit”? Seems like they’ve been on a continuous upward trajectory and he’s been at the helm nearly the whole time. When he took over, they had no products, no sales, no manufacturing. He’s been in charge since then, during which they built several factories, launched several models, and sold several million cars.
He’s obviously not running the place day to day all the time, but I don’t see a period of decline where you could point and say “that’s when Elon came in and screwed it up.”
SpaceX is know to have a department only dedicated to handling the dumb ideas from Elon.
Anyone with a bed of esmeralds could be a genius. It's only a question of luck.
This may be the most delusional comment in the history of HN.
I’m very much unconvinced by the “hard times strong men good times weak men hard times” cycle. It seems like something people come up with to justify their bad behavior, or the bad behavior of people they admire. Do “great men” actually come from difficult backgrounds at above the background rate? Or do we just tend to notice the ones who do?
>> I find it a sad thing that often great achievements and ruthlessness go hand in hand. “Hard times create strong men and strong men create good times” is a famous quote.
I wonder if this applies to computing where in the early days RAM and clock cycles were limited so programmers and engineers had to be more creative and do more for less, where now it's just buy another GB RAM stick for $50USD and try again.
I remember a youtube video with bwk (Brian Kernighan) and he was saying that when they were doing UNIX and computing in the 70s it was easy for them as they had all the low hanging fruit to pick where now you have to climb higher to get the fruit?
i am waiting for pizza maybe 300 feet from the original site of shockley semiconductors as i type this.
Who is the current occupant of the site? A quick search says Yahoo! and Coinbase. And maybe previously WeWork, temporarily leasing from Meta?
The historical former building stood unchanged until 5-10 years ago. There was a historical plaque on that building. It has been demolished and replaced by a nameless large 5-story office building.
The new building has an elaborate plaque facing the sidewalk. It includes a railroad diagram of the many corporate spinoffs from Shockley Semi.
Since I cant comment on the article directly, some corrections:
391 South San Antonio Road should be 391 San Antonio Road. The former is in a different city. You can see some diode sculptures outside the correct address (now a much larger building).
Similarly, "844 South Charleston Road" doesn't even exist - I suspect the author meant 844 East Charleston Road, which is near the Shockley Lab building.
Appreciated. I will update within the next few days. If you’d like an attribution, I can post your username here as the source, otherwise it’ll be “a commenter on HN”
While the article is reasonably complete, it is unbalanced, because it insists much more on the unpleasant personality of William Shockley than on his decisive contributions to the development of the semiconductor industry.
The conclusion of the article is correct that besides his own contributions to the theory of semiconductor devices his second great, even if unintended, achievement was hiring truly the best people, but then annoying them enough so that they have left and founded Fairchild Semiconductor, from where some of them have gone later to create many other of the most important companies of Silicon Valley.
However Shockley has contributed with much more than the invention of the bipolar junction transistor. His invention of the Shockley diode was not very important, because the PNPN switch had already been invented at Bell Labs 3 years earlier, in 1952, by Jewell J. Ebers. The innovation of Shockley was only to notice that a PNPN switch does not need control electrodes to be switched on, because it can be switched on by either the output voltage or by light, therefore it can be made as a diode instead of a tetrode, like previously.
More important has been that Shockley has invented not only the bipolar junction transistor (BJT) in 1948, but also the junction field-effect transistor (JFET) in 1951. For many decades these 2 have been the most important semiconductor devices, until the technology has progressed sufficiently to allow the control of the oxide-silicon interface well enough to allow the fabrication of MOS transistors (which had been invented well before WWII, but nobody knew how to make them).
Even more important is that he has published detailed theories about how the BJTs and the JFETs function, which allowed anyone to design such semiconductor devices.
These theories of the semiconductor transistors conceived by Shockley have been what has really started the semiconductor industry. The previous discovery of the point-contact transistor by Bardeen and Brattain has been more or less accidental and they did not understand how it works. Without the theory of Shockley none of the quick progresses from the years following 1948 would have existed.
It does note his achievements, but had the man had any charisma at all, Silicon Valley might not have been. That the man was repellent is pivotal to the founding of Fairchild and thus all of the fairchildren.
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"Greatness" and "repels people so hard that nobody wants to work with him" are not the same thing. Greatness does not require being that abhorrent to others.
Wild that people think only very specific human beings could have done this, there were multiple people working on the same problems, one of them was going to invent the thing, he wasn't the only genius around.
So much so there were plenty of others coming on his wake, creating and contributing even more to the field.
My father met several times Schockley in the 50-1960 He was a semi conductor engineer at Thomson-CSF in France (now ST Microelectronics). He made the first french diodes and transistors in the late 1950 in Grenoble. Thomson-CSF had a patent agreement with Bell Labs to make transistors. Part of the agreement was an annual consulting session with Schockley to exchange about manufacturing diodes and transistors. My father never spoke about Schockley's grumpiness.
I wonder if he held the same utility function for the entirety of his life, because the beginning and end of his life is quite dismal. Not one bit of reflection in his life seemed to change his tone.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
Look at the picture, you can notice who's shockley by just observing their facial expression. The cold-and-smart-than-you shockley in the middle. Shockley's personality becomes his mortal enemy, but that personality is also ncessary for his achievement.
If strength cannot become your weakness, than it's just mediocrity.
I think it’s a balance. You do need to be an asshole sometimes to get things done. But you don’t need to be an asshole all the time. It’s an easy excuse to say you need to be a prick because otherwise you cannot do your great achievements. It’s a false dichotomy. Even Einstein had friends.
Prime example of how one can make (dubious) conclusions from a still frame.
It's why I don't do video calls with my coworkers.
It’s true, it’s so easy to tell yourself a story about how good/bad a person is based on how a photo supports your existing beliefs.
Hopefully by now everyone knows the "crazy feminist lady" picture, which was a still frame from a pretty normal conversation where she wasn't even really supporting the feminist side that much, but got spread around the Internet by anti-feminists for years.
The picture is great. The senior manager on the right has a bit of a grimace in realizing yet again he'll need to smooth over Shockley's antagonism. The guy on the left has more of a smile and nod, and everything will be okay, type attitude.
Shockley recruited/managed both. Bardeen (on the left) went on to win a second Nobel for explaining superconductivity.