Working for Shockley proved to be a particular challenge. He extended his competitive nature even to his working relationships with the young physicists he supervised. Beyond that, he developed traits that we came to view as paranoid. He suspected that members of his staff were purposely trying to undermine the project and prohibited them from access to some of the work. He viewed several trivial events as malicious and assigned blame. He felt it necessary to check new results with his previous colleagues at Bell Labs, and he generally made it difficult for us to work together.

In what was probably the final straw, he decided the entire laboratory staff should undergo polygraph tests to determine who was responsible for a minor injury experienced by one of the office workers. While the group was making real progress in developing the technology needed to produce silicon transistors, Shockley's management style proved an increasing burden.

The group was in danger of breaking up. In fact, a few of the first recruits had already abandoned the lab for other jobs. To try to stabilize the organization, several of us went over Shockley's head, directly to Arnold Beckman, who had financed the start-up, suggesting that Shockley be removed from direct management of the lab and function only as a technical consultant.

We grossly overestimated our power. Shockley survived our insurrection, and when it failed, we felt we had to look elsewhere for jobs. In the process of searching, we became convinced that our best course was to set up our own company to complete Shockley's original goal — which he had abandoned by this time in favor of another semiconductor device he had also invented — to make a commercial silicon transistor.

This new company, financed by Fairchild Camera & Instrument Corp., became the mother organization for several dozen new companies in Silicon Valley. Nearly all the scores of companies that are or have been active in semiconductor technology can trace the technical lineage of their founders back through Fairchild to the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Unintentionally, Shockley contributed to one of the most spectacular and successful industry expansions in history.

Editor's note:

In 1963 Shockley left the electronics industry and accepted an appointment at Stanford. There he became interested in the origins of human intelligence. Although he had no formal training in genetics or psychology, he began to formulate a theory of what he called dysgenics. Using data from the U.S. Army's crude pre-induction IQ tests, he concluded that African Americans were inherently less intelligent than Caucasians — an analysis that stirred wide controversy among laymen and experts in the field alike.

Nonetheless, Shockley pursued his inflammatory ideas in a series of articles and speeches. Regularly interrupted by boos and catcalls, he argued that remedial educational programs were a waste of time. He suggested that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization. He donated openly and repeatedly to a so-called Nobel sperm bank designed to pass on the genes of geniuses. He filed a $1.25 million libel suit against the Atlanta Constitution, which had compared his ideas to Nazi genetic experiments; the jury awarded him $1 in damages. He ran for the U.S. Senate on the dysgenics platform and came in eighth.

Sadly, when he died at 79 of cancer, he regarded his work in genetics as more important than any role he played in creating the $130 billion semiconductor industry.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's rule of thumb, that chip power doubles every 18 months as prices decline, is now known as Moore's Law

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Jan. 2, 1961

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