William Bradford Shockley Jr., the world famous American physicist and co-inventor of the transistor, was born in London, United Kingdom. Shockley won the Nobel Prize in 1956.
Birth of Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor
William Bradford Shockley Jr., the world famous American physicist and co-inventor of the transistor, was born in London, United Kingdom. He was the manager of the research group at Bell Laboratories. This research team also included John Burdeen and Walter Brattain. These three scientists received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for their research on semiconductors and the invention of the transistor.
William Shockley pioneered the commercialization of new transistor designs in the 1950s and 1960s. California’s Silicon Valley was then a fertile ground for electronic product innovation. Shockley hired talented staff. But due to arbitrary and capricious management most of the workers left Shockley. Many of these workers later went on to build large IT companies. William Shockley taught electrical engineering at Stanford University. As an adult, Shockley was criticized for his racist views.
Shockley’s notable publications are ‘Shockley on Eugenics and Race: The Application of Science to the Solution of Human Problems’ (1992), ‘Mechanics’ (1966) and ‘Electronics and Holes in Semiconductors, with Applications to Transistor Electronics’ (1956).
Read also: “Remembering Famous Scientist Thomas Alva Edison: February 11th Birth Anniversary”
Shockley’s name is number 3 on the list of 150 greatest inventors in MIT’s 150-year history published in 2011. He is also named in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. Among the awards that Shockley received, the notable ones are IEEE Medal of Honor (1980), Nobel Prize in Physics (1956), Comstock Prize in Physics (1953), Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize (1953) etc. William Shockley left the world on August 12, 1989.
13 February 2001
Google’s first acquisition
Google buys Doy News Service of Usenet Services. It was Google’s first acquisition. Google also bought Doi News’ archive. Doi.com later became Google Groups. As a result, users could read news and other articles from DOI using Usenet newsgroups from within Google Groups. This archive contained news and other material up to 11 May 1981. In March 1995 in Austin, Texas, Steve Madere founded the Doy News Research Service based on user discussions in Usenet discussion groups. Meanwhile, Google has announced to stop the usenet news service in Google Groups from February 24.
