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Transistor Technology Evokes New Physics

Semiconductor Research Leading to the Point Contact Transistor

Surface Properties of Semiconductors

"for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect"

William Bradford Shockley	John Bardeen	Walter Houser Brattain

1/3 of the prize	1/3 of the prize	1/3 of the prize
USA	USA	USA
Semiconductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments, Inc. Mountain View, CA, USA	University of Illinois Urbana, IL, USA	Bell Telephone Laboratories Murray Hill, NJ, USA
b. 1910 (in London, United Kingdom) d. 1989	b. 1908 d. 1991	b. 1902 d. 1987

Biography: William Bradford Shockley

William Shockley was born in London, England, on 13th February, 1910, the son of William Hillman Shockley, a mining engineer born in Massachusetts and his wife, Mary (née Bradford) who had also been engaged in mining, being a deputy mineral surveyor in Nevada.

The family returned to the United States in 1913 and William Jr. was educated in California, taking his B.Sc. degree at the California Institute of Technology in 1932. He studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Professor J.C. Slater and obtained his Ph.D. in 1936, submitting a thesis on the energy band structure of sodium chloride. The same year he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, working in the group headed by Dr. C.J. Davisson and remained there (with brief absences for war service, etc.) until 1955. He resigned his post of Director of the Transistor Physics Department to become Director of the Shockley Semi-conductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments, Inc., at Mountain View, California, for research development and production of new transistor and other semiconductor devices. In 1963 he was named first Alexander M. Poniatoff Professor of Engineering Science at Stanford University, where he will act as professor-at-large in engineering and applied sciences.

During World War II he was Research Director of the Anti-submarine Warfare Operations Research Group and he afterwards served as Expert Consultant in the offce of the Secretary for War.

He held two visiting lectureships: in 1946 at Princeton University, and in 1954 at the California Institute of Technology. For one year (1954-1955) he was Deputy Director and Research Director of the Weapons System Evaluation Group in the Defence Department.

Shockley's research has been centred on energy bands in solids; order and disorder in alloys; theory of vacuum tubes; self-diffusion of copper; theories of dislocations and grain boundaries; experiment and theory on ferromagnetic domains; experiments on photoelectrons in silver chloride; various topics in transistor physics and operations research on the statistics of salary and individual productivity in research laboratories.

His work has been rewarded with many honours. He received the Medal for Merit in 1946, for his work with the War Department; the Morris Leibmann Memorial Prize of the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1952; the following year, the Oliver E. Buckley Solid State Physics Prize of the American Physical Society, and a year later the Cyrus B. Comstock Award of the National Academy of Sciences. The crowning honour - the Nobel Prize for Physics - was bestowed on him in 1956, jointly with his two former colleagues at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain.

In 1963 he was selected as recipient of the Holley Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Dr. Shockley has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel of the U.S. Army since 1951 and he has served on the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board since 1958. In 1962 he was appointed to the President's Scientific Advisory Committee. He has received honorary science doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University and Gustavus Adolphus Colleges (Minn.).

In addition to numerous articles in scientific and technical journals, Shockley has written Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors (1950) and has edited Imperfections of Nearly Perfect Crystals (1952). He has taken out more than 50 U.S. patents for his inventions.

Dr. Shockley has been married twice, and has three children by his first marriage to Jean (née Bailey). This union ended in divorce; his second wife is Emmy Lanning.

Biography: John Bardeen

John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on May 23, 1908, son of Dr. Charles R. Bardeen, and Althea Harmer. Dr. Bardeen was Professor of Anatomy, and Dean of the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. After the death of Althea, when John was about twelve years old, Dr. Bardeen married Ruth Hames, now Mrs. Kenelm McCauley, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

John Bardeen attended the University High School at Madison for several years, but graduated from Madison Central High School in 1923. This was followed by a course in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, in which much extra work was taken in mathematics and physics. After being out for a term while working in the engineering department of the Western Electric Company at Chicago, he graduated with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1928. He continued on at Wisconsin as a graduate research assistant in electrical engineering for two years, working on mathematical problems in applied geophysics and on radiation from antennas. It was during this period that he got his first introduction to quantum theory from Professor J.H. Van Vleck.

Professor Leo J. Peters, under whom the research in geophysics was done, took a position at the Gulf Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Bardeen followed him there and worked during the next three years (1930-1933) on the development of methods for the interpretation of magnetic and gravitational surveys. This was a stimulating period in which geophysical methods were first being applied to prospecting for oil.

Because he felt his interests were more in pure than in applied science, Bardeen resigned his position at Gulf in 1933 to take graduate work in mathematical physics at Princeton University. It was here under the leadership of Professor E.P. Wigner, that he first became interested in solid state physics. Before completing his thesis (on the theory of the work function of metals) he was offered a position as Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He spent there the next three years, 1935-1938, working with Professors Van Vleck and Bridgman on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals, and also did some work on level density of nuclei. The Ph.D. degree at Princeton was awarded in 1936.

From 1938-1941, Bardeen was an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Minnesota and from 1941-1945 a civilian physicist at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Work done during the war was on influence fields of ships for application to underwater ordnance and mine-sweeping. After the war, in late 1945, he joined the solid state research group at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and remained there until 1951, when he was appointed Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Physics at the University of Illinois. Since 1959 he has also been a member of the Center for Advanced Study of the University.

Main fields of research since 1945 have been electrical conduction in semiconductors and metals, surface properties of semiconductors, theory of superconductivity, and diffusion of atoms in solids. In 1957, Bardeen and two colleagues, L.N. Cooper and J.R. Schrieffer, proposed the first successful explanation of superconductivity. Much of his research effort since that time has been devoted to further extensions and applications of the theory.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, has been (1954-1957) a member of its Council, and on the Editorial Board of The Physical Review and Reviews of Modern Physics. From 1959-1962, he served as a member of the United States President's Science Advisory Committee.

Bardeen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1954. Honours include the Stuart Ballentine Medal of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia (1952) and the John Scott Medal of the City of Philadelphia (1955), both awarded jointly with Dr. W.H. Brattain, the Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society (1955) and D.Sc. (Hon.) from Union College and from the University of Wisconsin. He received the Fritz London Award for work in low temperature physics in 1962.

Bardeen married Jane Maxwell in 1938. They have three children, James Maxwell, William Allen and Elizabeth Ann.

Biography: Walter Houser Brattain

Walter H. Brattain was born in Amoy, China, on February 10, 1902, the son of Ross R. Brattain and Ottilie Houser. He spent his childhood and youth in the State of Washington and received a B.S. degree from Whitman College in 1924. He was awarded the M.A. degree by the University of Oregon in 1926 and the Ph.D. degree by the University of Minnesota in 1929.

Dr. Brattain has been a member of the Bell Laboratories technical staff since 1929. The chief field of his research has been the surface properties of solids. His early work was concerned with thermionic emission and adsorbed layers on tungsten. He continued on into the field of rectification and photo-effects at semiconductor surfaces, beginning with a study of rectification at the surface of cuprous oxide. This work was followed by similar studies of silicon. Since World War II he has continued in the same line of research with both silicon and germanium.

Dr. Brattain's chief contributions to solid state physics have been the discovery of the photo-effect at the free surface of a semiconductor; the invention of the point-contact transistor jointly with Dr. John Bardeen, and work leading to a better understanding of the surface properties of semiconductors, undertaken first with Dr. Bardeen, later with Dr. C.G.B. Garrett, and currently with Dr. P.J. Boddy.

Dr. Brattain received the honorary Doctor of Science degree from Portland University in 1952, from Whitman College and Union College in 1955, and from the University of Minnesota in 1957. In 1952 he was awarded the Stuart Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute, and in 1955 the John Scott Medal. The degree at Union College and the two medals were received jointly with Dr. John Bardeen, in recognition of their work on the transistor.

Dr. Brattain is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the Franklin Institute; a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a member of the commission on semiconductors of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and of the Naval Research Advisory Committee.

In 1935 he married the late Dr. Keren (Gilmore) Brattain; they had one son, William Gilmore Brattain. In 1958 he married Mrs. Emma Jane (Kirsch) Miller. Dr. Brattain lives in Summit, New Jersey, near the Murray Hill (N.J.) laboratory of Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Nobel Lecture: William Bradford Shockley

Transistor Technology Evokes New Physics

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