About William Shockley
William Bradford Shockley was an American solid-state physicist. He was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect." Shockley was one of the first recruits to Bell Telephone Laboratories by Mervin Kelly, who became director of research at the company in 1936 and focused on hiring solid-state physicists. He recruited brilliant employees, but quickly alienated them with his autocratic and erratic management; they left and founded major companies in the industry. In his later life, while he was a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and afterward, Shockley became known as a racist and a eugenicist.
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