William Shockley

William Bradford Shockley (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) American physicist, eugenicist and co-inventor of the transistor with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. His attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 60s led directly to the creation of Silicon Valley. In his later life, Shockley was a "superb" professor at Stanford.http://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/shockley/shockley3.html

Quotes

• "I am overwhelmed by an irresistible temptation to do my climb by moonlight and unroped." Shockley, 1947
• "I had one experience which gave me some slant on the way large organizations run. I was not allowed to take spherical trigonometry because I'd sprained my ankle. Because I'd sprained my ankle I had an incomplete in gym, phys ed. And the rule was that if you had an incomplete in anything, you were not allowed to take an overload. I argued with some clerical person in the administration office, and was stopped there. It's an experience which I've remembered since, and advised people not to be stopped at the first point." -Shockley