William Shockley's controversial life

[Blocked Ads] After his Phd from MIT he joined Bell Labs like so many other names, either it was a great place to be at or may be that was just in fashion. Today, we can fit a radio on anything, but if any of you have seen a radio of 50's then you would agree, that something had to be done about it. Shockley knew that too. Based on his ideas, two other collegues Bardeen and Brattain (who later shared the Nobel with him as well) developed the first transistor. Later, he explained the working of this device in detail and developed the transistor, called "junction transistor", which is the main cog of today's machines.

He left Bell Labs and formed his own company, financed by Beckman Instruments. Einstein is called the father of atom bomb, which he did not make, and he is called the father of silicon valley, which he quite literally did start by creation of this company. His management style was'nt the popular one and he is known to be paranoid. The crisis reached its height when he had his employees pass the lie detector test, as he was suspecting conspiracy. After this, many left his company and formed their own, known as Fairchild. Some of these people, like Gordon Moore would later leave Fairchild and creat Intel.

His company was'nt that great a success. In later life he acquired other interests for which he would become notorious. His new found interest was population development and control, how to create the best breed. With not much knowledge and great conviction he started preaching this idea that better breed needs to be promoted. There could be misinformation in the resources I used, as he was not the most loved personality, but two things are enough evidence for me that he had lost track. First is that he put forward the idea the people of low intelligence be paid to go through voluntary sterilization and second, that he donated his sperm to a sperm bank created to spread this intelligent race.

Although he was a great man, responsible for such great progress of today, but his confidence and conviction (delusion) about matters which he did not have any solid proof or rigorous research led him down. He was forwarding his views without critically examining his own methods and motives. He was a genius and a visionary but that did not guarantee that any view he strongly believed would, necessarily be true.