Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age

Who has been the most influential person in history?.... Typical answers to this question are Einstein, Newton, Guttenberg, Gates, Jobs....etc...etc...etc.... However, you will never hear Schockley even though we enjoy lots of things we take for granted like this internet tool and computers just to name a few. If you ever wonder why technology has been moving so rapidly over such a few years span, one of the answers is the transistor...Well, transistor = Schockley... you do the math. Unfortunately he fell from graces on many people's eyes but I won't tell you why. I'll let you be the judge of that.... read the book, it's good.

The winners write the history, and the history of Silicon Valley is no exception. Until this book William Shockley, if he was known at all, was thought of as the eccentric Nobel Prize winner who became an intellectual outcast because of his eugenics beliefs and as the bad manager whose employees quit and founded Fairchild and Intel. For those who know a bit more about the history of Silicon Valley technology, William Shockley is known as the founder of the Valley's first semiconductor company. Shockley recruited and assembled the seminal team that was the progenitor of every other semiconductor company in Silicon Valley. His instincts for talent-spotting were phenomenal, but they were matched by a massive lack of judgment about how to build products customers would buy and a complete lack of the insights necessary to motivate and manage an entrepreneurial company. Joel Shurkin does a good job in telling the story of not just Schokley Semiconductor, but the interesting life surrounding it all- the rise and fall - of William Schockley. A great read.

Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age Compliment to the writer who made the life of William Shockley so much more interesting than it really was. Shockley's inventions in technology is profound however, Shockley's life is really not that interesting. In essence, Shockley was a smart man, went to top schools, recruited by top people and top corporations, invented a lot to help our country (during the wars) and invented a lot to help the world (especially in his transistor and silicon invention), married twice, made some babies, toward the later part of his life, he got into study of genes and racial profiling in IQ and then he died at 80. If you are curios about what Shockley's inventions were, you would be fascinated by this documentation and litany of items listed. If you want to know the history of IQ controversy or whether blacks' IQ are truly inferior to whites, you will see lurid details on this. However, if you are like me, reading this book looking for fascinating human stories (ala Huge Hefner of the Playboy enterprise or Rupert Murdoch of the News Corps or even Mao Tze Tung of Communist China), you may be disappointed. In reality, Shockley lived a typical American suburbia life (the most exciting part of his life may be going to Norway to obtain his Nobel). You don't see him hanging out at the Playboy mansion at 70s with the hottest super models like Huge Hefner or flying to China to close a major media deal like Rupert Murdoch. Shockley's life was boring. May be he had bad relations with his kids (but then who does not?) and he was also not good at being nice in dealing with people but most engineers are like that, nothing new here. So, full credit to the writer who successfully made William Shockley's life so much more interesting than it really was - by applying an approach of story telling to add context and flavor - for example, in the story of his first company and the departure of the 11 original scientists Shockley hired, the writer discussed how Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore left and started their own company. This made the whole story more interesting. Now we know Gordon Moore was rated by Shockley's IQ tests as "not a good manager". Making dull topic interesting, one win for the author. Five Stars to the author for making a dull topic interesting. Three Stars to the content (the life of William Shockley - boring stuff). A reminder that we should go out and truly have fun in life. Go to a night club, fool around with some girls, go to a foreign country and do some bumgy jumping. Don't live life like Shockley.

William Shockley generated some mild controversy as a co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the transistor, and a firestorm of controversy as an investigator of supposed linkages between race and intelligence. Mr. Shurkin sheds considerable light on both disputes, as well as on those facets of Shockley's personality which occasionally drifted from merely difficult into the scarier modes of overbearing and compulsive. The author's own attitude toward his subject leans, quite understandably, toward an uneasy blend of admiration and exasperation. The transistor Nobel was awarded in 1954 to Shockley and his Bell Labs colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. A problematic aspect of the choice to honor all three was that although Shockley nominally led the research group, his direct involvement in the original (point contact) transistor invention was minimal. He did, however, have a legitimate conceptual claim to the later junction-type device, which became the practical transistor we know today. Shurkin's description of the contentious priority issues involved, and the human interactions among the principals, is fascinating. One might say it's ironically fitting that a self-assured, iconoclastic, socially tone-deaf character like Shockley would blunder into the potential minefield of race/intelligence studies. On top of that, he chose the most politically radioactive combination possible -- white vs. black. The spectrum of opinion on that topic was (and is) bracketed at one end by bigots who just knew there must be an intelligence gap, and at the other end by knee-jerk egalitarians who just knew there couldn't possibly be one. The bigots embarrassed Shockley with unwanted support, and the egalitarians excoriated him for even looking at the question. The most recent and reasonable consensus seems to be that racial differences, genomically speaking, are too trivial to account for intelligence variations beyond the normal and expected spread due to both intra- and interracial gene mixing. The biography is well-written and consistently interesting, but there are too many glitches to ignore. For example, "Schrodinger's atoms" on page 25 should be electrons, and the claim that Shockley wrote "the first textbook of the electronic age" (p.122) sounds preposterous to anyone who remembers vacuum tubes. Perhaps the author meant solid-state electronic age. For a similar reason, the book's subtitle needs revision. On page 105, the translation of 0.04 centimeter to 0.16 inch is too high by a factor of 10. The name of the strength program a youthful Shockley modeled for is spelled "Trelor" three times on page 18, but the ad reproduced on the same page conspicuously says "Treloar."

Shockley worked at Bell Labs for many years. I, too, worked there and had no idea why we did what we did, why we had the philosophies we did, etc... Almost 35 years later, I still saw the footprints of Shockley's world. That, to me, was very interesting. His life was extraordinary and a huge lesson in something. I'm not sure what that something is yet but after this all soaks in, maybe I can make heads or tails of it. It was all so strange. A brilliant mind is all so strange and the author did such a superb job of letting us into the secret. Thanks Joel!