William Bradford Shockley

William Shockley Photo: Deutsches Museum, Munich

William Bradford Shockley was born on February 13, 1910, as the son of a mining engineer in London. He spent his childhood in Palo Alto and in Hollywood.

He began has studies at the California Institute of Technology and attained a doctorate in 1936 in physics in Harvard. He started work at the Bell Labs, where he remained until 1955. Afterwards, he became director of the Shockley semiconductor laboratory at Beckman Instruments, Inc.

In 1956, he received the Nobel Prize for Physics together with Bardeen and Brattain. From 1963, he was a professor at Stanford University. Shockley died in Stanford in 1989.