Word: shockley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...grossly overestimated our power. Shockley survived our insurrection, and when it failed, we felt we had to look elsewhere for jobs. In the process of searching, we became convinced that our best course was to set up our own company to complete Shockley's original goal--which he had abandoned by this time in favor of another semiconductor device he had also invented--to make a commercial silicon transistor...
This new company, financed by Fairchild Camera & Instrument Corp., became the mother organization for several dozen new companies in Silicon Valley. Nearly all the scores of companies that are or have been active in semiconductor technology can trace the technical lineage of their founders back through Fairchild to the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Unintentionally, Shockley contributed to one of the most spectacular and successful industry expansions in history...
...Shockley left the electronics industry and accepted an appointment at Stanford. There he became interested in the origins of human intelligence. Although he had no formal training in genetics or psychology, he began to formulate a theory of what he called dysgenics. Using data from the U.S. Army's crude pre-induction IQ tests, he concluded that African Americans were inherently less intelligent than Caucasians--an analysis that stirred wide controversy among laymen and experts in the field alike...
Nonetheless, Shockley pursued his inflammatory ideas in a series of articles and speeches. Regularly interrupted by boos and catcalls, he argued that remedial educational programs were a waste of time. He suggested that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization. He donated openly and repeatedly to a so-called Nobel sperm bank designed to pass on the genes of geniuses. He filed a $1.25 million libel suit against the Atlanta Constitution, which had compared his ideas to Nazi genetic experiments; the jury awarded him $1 in damages. He ran for the U.S. Senate on the dysgenics...
Unlike so many of the inventions that have moved the world, this one truly was the work of one man. Thomas Edison got credit for the light bulb, but he had dozens of people in his lab working on it. William Shockley may have fathered the transistor, but two of his research scientists actually built it. And if there ever was a thing that was made by committee, the Internet--with its protocols and packet switching--is it. But the World Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He loosed it on the world. And he more...