There is a note on an inventor’s notebook that is considered the Big Bang of the electronic age. This is the sentence written by William Bradford Shockley on December 29, 1939. Shockley was an Anglo-American physicist and engineer (born in London to American parents). He was 29 that day and wrote: “It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible”.
Era the intuition from which he would develop the transistors and thanks to which in 1956 he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956 (with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain), paving the way for the miniaturization of electronics. In those days, in fact, large and inefficient tube tubes were used, which will be replaced by transistors.
Shockley, however, is a controversial figure. In the biography dedicated to him, entitled Broken Genius, it is said that on the one hand he was fundamental to affirm electronics, first by making transistors at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, and then as a pioneer-entrepreneur of semiconductors in California; but he is also known for his racist theories of intelligence. In the 1960s, using Nobel fame, he waged a battle for eugenics, arguing that intelligence was hereditary, that blacks were less intelligent of whites and that they should be prevented from having children. But these were the years of Martin Luther King and the battles of the civil rights movement and Shockley’s reputation was destroyed.
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