Electronic devices all over the world run using transistors. William Shockley is one of the inventors of the transistor. He was reprehensible, at the same time he was reprehensible. In the 21st century, technology is inextricably linked with our daily lives. The modern technology that we are using the most is information technology. Almost all our jobs are now computerized in some way.

Transistor

When the first computer ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was built in 1945, it used thousands of vacuum tubes. Back then, a computer required at least 50 feet by 30 feet of space. At that time, no one could have imagined that one day computers will literally be in the hands of people. Today in 2023, 8 billion people in the world have 1400 million smartphones. The invention of electronics that led to a huge industrial revolution around the world is rooted in the invention of the transistor.

The brightest day in the history of technology is marked on December 16, 1947, when the first transistor was manufactured at the Bell Telephone Laboratory in the United States. In 1956, three Bell Laboratory scientists—John Burdeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley—received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of this transistor.

The invention of the transistor has been identified as the most important invention of the 20th century. Because, the huge improvement in information technology that has happened in the world today, is based on the transistor. The transistor has been compared to the 'nerve cell' of the electronic age. William Shockley was not directly involved with Burdeen and Brattain's work, although he headed the research group at Bell Laboratories. As a result, Bell Laboratories patented the first transistor in the name of John Burdeen and Walter Brattain. But William Shockley was very angry.

He himself patented a more advanced transistor, proving that if Burdeen and Brattain were the fathers of the transistor, then Shockley was the grandfather of the transistor. It was William Shockley who founded the first factory to manufacture transistors, later leading the way for Silicon Valley. As one of the most important inventors in the history of technology in the 20th century, William Shockley was on the one hand widely admired, and on the other for his personal narcissism and sectarian racism. This story is the story of William Shockley.