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William B. Shockley, American engineer and teacher, cowinner (with John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain) of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956 for their development of the transistor, a device that largely replaced the bulkier and less-efficient vacuum tube and ushered in the age of microminiature

William Shockley Jr. (February 13, 1910–August 12, 1989) was an American physicist, engineer, and inventor who led the research team credited with developing the transistor in 1947. For his achievements, Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.

William Shockley, Stanford professor and winner of the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for his co-invention of the transistor, was arguably the single person most responsible for ushering in the computer age. He was also an ardent eugenicist whose theories of black racial inferiority eventually made him an academic pariah. Extremist Info Born 1910 Died

William B. Shockley Biographical . W illiam Shockley was born in London, England, on 13th February, 1910, the son of William Hillman Shockley, a mining engineer born in Massachusetts and his wife, Mary (née Bradford) who had also been engaged in mining, being a deputy mineral surveyor in Nevada.

Died: 12 August 1989, Palo Alto, CA, USA Affiliation at the time of the award: Semiconductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments, Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA Prize motivation: “for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect” Prize share: 1/3 Work