WILLIAM SHOCKLEY, NOBEL WINNER WHO STIRRED RACIAL CONTROVERSY
Author: By Mary McGrath, Associated Press
Date: Tuesday, August 15, 1989
Page: 49
Section: OBITUARY
SAN FRANCISCO -- By helping to invent the transistor, William Shockley did
as much to shape the modern world as Louis Pasteur or Madame Curie, colleagues
said. But he died with a reputation tarnished by his controversial racial
theories.
Mr. Shockley, who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for physics, died Saturday
of prostate cancer at his home on the campus of Stanford University, the
university said Sunday. He was 79.
He was among the fathers of the electronic age but spent his later years
embroiled in controversy over his theory that intelligence is genetically
based and that blacks as a group are inferior to whites.
"I would say he would have to be compared to people who opened up huge new
areas, such as Pasteur or the Salk vaccine," said professor William E. Spicer,
Mr. Shockley's friend and colleague for 33 years.
"But certainly the controversies he got into later in life made it much
more difficult for him to get recognition for his key contribution," said
Spicer, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford.
Mr. Shockley shared the Nobel Prize with his colleagues from Bell
Laboratories, John Bardeen and the late Walter H. Brattain. He also was
professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford.
The team's first device, developed during what they later called a "magic
month" during 1947, was an innovation that made vacuum tubes obsolete and the
electronic age possible. Most modern devices, from airplanes to wristwatches
to computers, contain the technical descendants of Mr. Shockley's work.
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories, the company he founded after leaving
Bell labs in 1954, was instrumental in the birth of Silicon Valley and the
electronics industry. His former employees later invented the integrated
circuit and the microprocessor, the building blocks of the computer age.
Mr. Shockley sparked campus demonstrations by claiming that intellectually
inferior blacks were producing children faster than mentally superior whites.
His genetic theories also prompted debate over the use of IQ tests in schools
and why blacks failed to score as well as whites. Most experts have blamed
this outcome on biased tests and other factors not related to genetics.
Many of Mr. Shockley's scientific colleagues ridiculed his racial theories
and abandoned their association with him, claiming he had passed beyond his
field of expertise and was acting irresponsibly.
A 1980 article in The Atlanta Constitution comparing Shockley's theories
to Nazism drew a libel suit from Mr. Shockley, who sued the newspaper for
$1.25 million. A federal jury awarded him $1 in the case, and the US Supreme
Court in 1986 turned down Mr. Shockley's attempt to revive the lawsuit.
Mr. Shockley's wife, Emmy, said he considered his research on intelligence
his most valuable work and that he continued to write papers on the subject
until a few days before his death.
Mr. Shockley, born in London and raised in Pao Alto, received his Ph.D. in
solid-state physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1932 and
joined the staff of American Telephone & Telegraph Co.'s Bell Laboratories in
Murray Hill, N.J., in 1936.
Mr. Shockley leaves his wife; two sons, William and Richard; a daughter,
Alison Ianelli; and one granddaughter.
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