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William B Shockley biography

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  • NAME: William B Shockley
  • OCCUPATION: Physicist
  • BIRTH DATE: February 13, 1910
  • DEATH DATE: August 12, 1989
  • EDUCATION: California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • PLACE OF BIRTH: Stanford, California
  • PLACE OF DEATH: Palo Alto, California
  • Full Name: William Bradford Shockley
  • AKA: William Shockley

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William Shockley was an engineer and co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956 for his development of the transistor.


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Born in Stanford, California, in 1910, William Shockley joined Bell Telephone in 1936 and experimented with semiconductors, leading to the invention and development of the transistor. He and his colleagues invented the point-contact transistor in 1947 and a more effective device, the junction transistor, in 1948. The device largely replaced the bulkier and less-efficient vacuum tube and ushered in the age of microminiature electronics.

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